For example, in “Wishy Washy”, Carré’s protagonist is a man with an utterly uncompromising approach to life, unwavering in his decisions, sticking to his daily habits and routines with metronomic accuracy: “Whether I’m in a hotel or at my apartment, I wake up at 8am sharp and look out the window first thing.” When his inability to change course (literally) leads to a disastrous automobile crash, he recovers to find he is unable to make any decisions at all. Even his morning regimen confounds him: “Why should one pair of socks be chosen over another?” Unfortunately, this total reversal of mindset leads not to moral epiphany but only to further
disaster.

The clear highlights in Heads or Tails are the two longest pieces: “That Thing about Madeline” (featured in Best American Comics 2008) and “The Carnival” (originally published in Mome and featured in Best American Non-Required Reading 2010), both of which share the collection’s theme of duality, as well as the eerie, enigmatic quality of Carré’s debut with Fantagraphics, her graphic novel The Lagoon (2009).

In “The Thing about Madeline” the title heroine is a rather sad sort who ends each mundane workday as a salesperson for a soap factory by tanking up at a local bar and listening to the same jukebox song over and over again until she needs to be escorted home by a man named Jacob, who doesn’t seem to mind this nightly routine, being clearly interested in her. One night, Madeline staggers home only to encounter herself, already asleep in bed. This doppelganger quickly takes over Madeline’s life, leading it far more successfully and healthily (even getting a romance going with Jacob), while Madeline passively watches the activity from windows: “… like watching a movie with the sound turned low.” Unable to integrate her two halves, she dodges the conundrum by boarding a bus out of town. (The story does not end there.) Carré weaves this tale of the uncanny with low-key efficiency and keen psychological underpinnings, subtly suggesting that Madeline’s dilemma has sprung from the tension between her subconscious desire to alter her tacky existence, and her stubborn unwillingness to do so.

Even better is “The Carnival,” a gorgeously colored 32-page story that unfolds with mesmeric dream logic. Like Madeline, the hero of the piece, Henry, is a salesperson (his line is cars). He plods through life listlessly until one night when he impulsively skips town for a few days. On a whim, he stops at a carnival and meets a nameless woman with a young boy in tow (who upon closer look resembles Henry). Though Carré leaves the woman’s role ambiguous—she may be aligned with some elemental or supernatural forces, especially considering the memorable manner in which she exits the story—it is clear that she sparks something in Henry: sexual desire, to be sure, but perhaps also the ability to dream of a life less prosaic – or even the ability to dream at all. Subtle and ambiguous but not opaque, Carré leaves the story particulars and ultimate meanings for the reader to suss out, inviting a re-read or two.

Visually, Carré is versatile, veering from the highly stylized, design-y imagery of the book’s opener, “Kingdom,” to the rubbery-limbed, Lynda Barry-esque figures of “Madeline” and “The Carnival” to the grittier black and white renderings of ”Too Hot to Sleep.” Even the least of the entries here, such as the somewhat twee “Moss” and “Marching Band,” are beguiling baubles of comic art, wrapped up in delightful colors and confidently rendered with faux-naïve figures bounding, floating or twisting their way through the panels and pages. Carré’s characters may be sometimes literally split in two, but their stories are satisfyingly all of a piece. This is a unified and cohesive collection from a significant artist and engaging storyteller.

Comic by Asia Bordowa

Nowhere is this more evident than in Asia Bordowa’s “Radical Cheerleader” history. Punk rock became a huge rallying cry for a generation that seized their new-found freedom of speech to mix protest and performance. Dedicated to protesting against homophobia, sexism, and limitations against reproductive rights, Bordowa became part of an art-intensive group involved with comics, zines, music, and performance/protest art, creating a community out of whole cloth from the like-minded who rejected the ruthlessness of capitalism along with the shackles of communism. Her drawing is classic zine-scrawl. Maria Rostocka’s “The Flashy Queen” takes a different approach, attacking the oppressive greyness of post-Communist Poland with a bright palette in terms of dress. That move has its own problems, as the initial attention it gives her leads to jealousy and eventual ostracism—for her, creating art seems to be a means of coping. There’s a sensitivity to her watercolor technique that adds to the emotional fragility of the work.

Comic by Maria Rostocka

A number of the stories in the book are mere snippets, like Ada Buchholc’s four-page, duo-toned piece about running that’s part of her larger project of comics related to body image. Maja Demska’s “Everything I Do Is Personal” is a design-heavy account of being frustrated with one’s identity, personified in the way she uses her eyeglasses to stand in for her. There are scribbly diary comics from Agnieszka Piksa, detailed experiences about art school from Marta Nieznayu, and memory flash comics from Jadwiga Zelazny. In general, the artists in this book tend to be either highly-trained designers with extensive art school backgrounds or DIY scribblers who have more in common with zine culture than comics culture.

Comic by Oliwia Ziebinska

One thing I always enjoy about anthologies like this is discovering artists I wish I could see more of right away. Maria Ines Gul smears black, white, and grey in interesting ways to talk about the past and wonder about the future, creating a visual style both childlike and sophisticated. Joanna Karpowicz is a superb illustrator with a rich color sense and a sharp sense of humor. Her “Five Random Life Lessons From Childhood” are hilarious, as when she portrays herself managing to sleep through being left outside in freezing weather as a baby, which leads to the moral: “Sleep your troubles away.” Ola Szmida’s fanciful drawings about trying to find a sport that fit her mixes a clear line, a restrained use of color, cursive lettering a la Vanessa Davis, and a wickedly self-deprecating sense of humor. Agata Wawryniuk’s mix of delicate lines for her figures and thicker lines for her panels and construction of hair, along with exaggerated and rubbery anatomy creates a dense but playful atmosphere for her history of antagonism with her mother. Her nearest American analogue in terms of style is Lilli Carré. Olga Wrobel’s beautifully rendered, deeply felt, yet sly satirical letters to her fictional future granddaughters about her loves and relationships gets across a lot of emotional content thanks to her sophisticated understanding of character design and body language. Finally, Oliwia Ziebinksa’s stark and brutal “Enter Me” is an account of her missing childhood memories and a harrowing tour of what might be missing, told in a visceral but stylized manner.

Comic by Maria Ines Gul

I’m hoping that this anthology is just the first of many attempts by Centrala to reach out to a larger audience, because there’s clearly a great deal of strong work here that deserves wider recognition. It’s to the Polish scene’s credit that no single visual style seems to be particularly in vogue, which makes sense considering the wide variety of influences that are cycling through the scene. There’s a freshness and lack of cynicism that stands out in this book, as using comics as a means of expression and possibly even making a living from it is still a new idea. Hopefully, this book can serve to further link Poland to the wider European and international comics scenes.

This collection of comics originally published in 1994 and 1995 follows the adventures of Lenny the Frog in his swamp. All of the animals and insects in the swamp are intelligent and have needs and dreams not unlike humans, but they are very much still animals and part of a food chain. Indeed, Lenny bemoans nearly being eaten every time he tries to sit still for a moment, think, and philosophize. The obvious touchstone comparison for True Swamp is Walt Kelly’s Pogo, and Lewis clearly drew inspiration from Kelly in terms of setting up a particular kind of swamp patois and creating a huge, broad cast of colorful characters. Where Lewis sharply differs is in the way he depicts these characters. This is a raw, nasty world where death is always at hand, yet there are small joys to be experienced every day. Love, sex, friendship, jealousy, knowledge, and religion are all important concerns, but they are experienced in ways unique to each animal. The animals have animal needs—food, survival, and sex (just like humans)—and Lewis enjoys playing up the cruder aspects for humorous effect.

While quotidian details about life in the swamp and the emotional negotiations and struggles of the characters are important, each chapter has both a coherent plot structure as well as the underpinnings of subplot. “Choose Your Poison” introduces us to Lenny, but it also takes us on an adventure as he’s captured by a human who thinks he’s an entirely new species. In reality, Lenny had hired a marmot friend named Hale to paint a disguise that would fool gators and other predators into ignoring him, but it only served to pique the interest of humans. Lenny manages to accidentally kill his captor by thwipping his tongue up his nose and dislodging part of his brain, an event that brings great angst to the poor frog. He’s haunted by the specter of being a murderer for the rest of the book, even if he knows it was kill or be killed.

There’s a denseness to Lewis’ work that is satisfying as he draws his animals just a touch on the cute side without making them anthropomorphic. The details of everyday life are not spelled out but instead are introduced without explanation, as in the form of currency the animals use (the names of cities), the nature of religion, and the political backbiting that occurs in the swamp. One of the subplots early in the book is that of a human captured by fairies (and tipped off by Lenny) who is enchanted and then traded to a colony of ants for mysterious purposes. In “Blue Caboose”, Lenny meets a traveling frog named Twotongue who is a “book”–an animal who seeks specific kinds of knowledge. In this case, it’s “killer herps”–reptiles that kill larger animals. Twotongue was looking for the legendary Big Snipper, a herp serial killer, essentially. Upon finding his lair, there was no predator to be found–only a frog and his fungoid friend. The twists and turns of this story were remarkable, with a lot of jaw-dropping and frightening moments to go along with moments of genuine humor.

Further chapters see Lenny confronting a human-sized and -shaped colony of ants, dealing with his crush, and having casual sex with another frog (in this case, it’s just fertilizing eggs); Hale having a frank sex talk with another marmot and getting shot down; more animals searching for knowledge; a close encounter with some apparently mystical beings in a bacchanal; and the tragic death of a loved one. Lewis pulls the narrative strings tighter and tighter even as he introduces new characters and new information about the strange world they live in, meting it out in small doses. It doesn’t end on a cliffhanger so much as it just ends, as Lewis took a break of several years before he started working on the book again. The next volume will be collected by Uncivilized Books a bit later on; I imagine they’ll fold Lewis’s recent minicomics in as well. It’s a book that focuses on a single character as well as the world he lives in, shifting back and forth between the two and then combining that view for some key sequences.

At its heart, True Swamp is an existential howl. It’s as much about the artist’s own quest for meaning and purpose as it is for his characters. One can sense Lewis in the person of Lenny the thinker, but also in the person of Hale the inventor and artist. Each character tries to find ways to motivate themselves to explore and engage the outside world, and each finds disappointment in a variety of fashions, both great (being wracked by guilt, being eaten by predators) and small (being shot down by potential mates, losing out on knowledge). One can sense how intuitive the storytelling is because even as the characters interact on a quotidian basis, Lewis reveals small but important details that add richness to their own interactions. On top of that, True Swamp is a world-building exercise that is not dominated by that world-building to the detriment of the stories or characters. Instead, a new aspect of the swamp is revealed in service to the story, like how the denizens drink alcohol or come together to party. Though there are a lot of rough edges here (especially in terms of things like lettering and inking), the bonus material shows just how hard Lewis worked in a short period of time. Indeed, the original version of True Swamp #1 is nearly illegible in comparison to what he would later publish. Seeing that rapid improvement is eye-opening, because it reveals just how important this project was to Lewis. It certainly stands the test of time.

Just glancing at that timeline, though, gave me pause. Why start at the 1940s? Why not begin earlier? I understand that TwoMorrows wants to focus solely on comic books, but even so, to ignore the first forty years of the newspaper comic strip, which, to put it mildly, laid most of the groundwork and influenced many if not all of the cartoonists that worked in the first few decades of the industry (to say nothing of the high aesthetics of the work being done during that period) seems problematic at best. Turning the book over in my hands I wondered: Is this going to be a thoughtful, engaging look at how the industry has changed over time, or just a fannish reminiscence of bygone years?

The answer appears to be a little from Column A, and a little from Column B. The book is at its best when discussing comic book companies that are not named DC or Marvel. Whereas the Big Two’s histories are well known, even among casual comics fans, the backstories of companies like Dell, Harvey, and even Archie aren’t. For example: Forgive my ignorance, but I never knew, that licensor Whitman split from Dell and formed Gold Key, so I found John Wells’s chronicle of that debacle fascinating.

Wells attempts to be as thorough as possible in the book, so we also get tidbits on the rise of fanzines and fan culture, Bob Bolling’s influential “Little Archie” stories, Roy Lichtenstein, the rise of interest in teenage hot-rod comics, a unsuccessful lawsuit between a music publishers’ group and Mad Magazine, and the birth of Creepy. It’s clear Wells and company wanted to leave no stone unturned and it’s nice to be reminded that not every popular comic book character in the 1960s wore circus suits and beat people up.

Certain bits of historical detail are engrossing as well. Portrayals of, for example, John F. Kennedy before and after his assassination, or confusion over the rise of The Beatles provide a nice bit of context. The book is also enlivened by the occasionally oddity or obscurity. Things like “Treasure Chest,” which told a multi-part story about a presidential election where the candidate is revealed at the end to be African-American, or the fact that DC attempted a James Bond comic only a few months before Dr. No arrived in theaters (surprise: It flopped).

Unfortunately, far too much of the book is spent on DC and Marvel. It’s understandable to an extent. Even back in the ‘60s, DC was one of the 500-pound industry gorillas, with such stalwarts as Superman and Batman still selling well. And it’s perfectly natural that Marvel would get a good part of the spotlight here, as this period effectively marks the birth of the so-called “Marvel Revolution.”

Wells does do readers a favor by reminding readers how slow the revolution took to build and that other, non-superhero Marvel titles, like Two-Gun Kid and Patsy Walker, were just as important to the company’s bottom line – at times more so — than the Fantastic Four.

But the basic problem here is that most fans, i.e. the kind that will search out and read this book, already know Marvel and DC’s histories inside and out. Minus a few minor exceptions, Wells doesn’t add enough nuance or new data to make these rehashed tales of Lee, Kirby, Ditko, and company seem fresh. It especially pales in comparison Sean Howe’s excellent history of Marvel, which, since it’s only a few months old, lingers in the back of the brain as an unfair comparison.

Wells covers so many companies, artists, and stories that the book starts to take on a metronome-like rhythm. This character appeared in this issue. This other character appeared in this other comic. This publisher did this. And this publisher did that. And so on and so forth. In his attempt to be as thorough as possible, Wells can only help but keep things on a surface, superficial level. We learn a great deal about who drew or wrote which story, but not enough about the cartoonists themselves, or what it was like to work in the industry during this period (except for the fact that Mort Weisinger was a horrible boss—which, again, we already knew).

He’s too effusive in his praise as well. Is “Robin Dies at Dawn” (Batman #517 for those of you keeping score) really “harrowing and poignant”? Our Army at War #113 might be notable for its exploration of prejudice, but is it really “a remarkably understated example of racial harmony”? I’m not saying these stories aren’t any good, but when both major and seemingly minor story lines are given such laudatory descriptions, it arouses suspicion and makes one wish for a more nuanced, critical eye.

Certainly the book is nicely illustrated and colorful, featuring panels and covers from just about every comic mentioned. Occasionally it offers something striking, like a two pages of black-and-white original art by Russ Manning for Magnus Robot Hunter. Unfortunately, those moments are few and far between.

Little attention is paid to comic strips, gag or editorial cartoons, or anything else comic-related that might have been going on in the 1960s. One notable exception is Sy Barry’s run on The Phantom and how Barry’s work ramped up interest in a long-neglected strip. Mention is also made of Dick Tracy’s bizarre “Moon Maiden” run. But often these little tidbits are quickly dropped in order to move on to the next item of business.

It’s hard to shake the feeling that the main goal of American Comic Book Chronicles – or this volume of it at any rate – is to offer little more than a nostalgia trip for baby boomer fans. There’s too much focus on the fictional characters, particularly the superheroes, and their various permutations, and not enough on the people that created these stories. I can’t say the book is a total failure for me. There was enough history and trivia contained in these pages to enlighten and entertain me at times, even if the “And then … and then” rhythm of the text made it difficult to get through at times. And certainly there’s a certain satisfaction in knowing that even back in the 1960s, nobody liked Hawkman. Yet while I applaud the overall concept behind this project, I have some real problems with the initial execution. Here’s hoping the future volumes do better.

The book is divided into roughly two sections: pre- and post-adolescence. Pre-adolescent “Goglu” (Castrée’s stand-in character) is constantly confused and bewildered, desperately wanting to feel safe and secure. Instead, she gets a constant diet of her young mother acting like the immature partier that she is. We get scene after scene of her mother and her friends drunk, high, causing accidents, and getting into loud, upsetting arguments–all with Goglu present to watch them. The most malevolent member of the cast of characters is Omer, her mother’s icy live-in boyfriend. There’s almost a relish with which Castrée draws him–all sneers and furrowed eyebrows, as though he long ago crushed any compassion or gentleness he might have held in his expression. The first half of the book consists of Goglu trying to make sense of her world and come to terms with her absent father, who lives at the other end of Canada, and whom she does not see between the ages of five and fifteen. It climaxes in her overhearing her mother express regret at not getting an abortion, which of course manifests in guilt on Goglu’s part, as she urges her mother to go back to school.

Of course, that would presume that her mother’s emotional development didn’t end at the age of seventeen (when she gave birth). As she gets older, her drunken and stoned antics start to deeply embarrass Goglu, whose house is inhospitable to having friends over. The older her mother gets, the more she seems to regress emotionally. It’s not even a case of benign neglect, as Goglu is punished for arbitrary slights (like using Omer’s stereo or spilling something). Goglu starts talking back to her mother, with the insult of “drunkard” earning not just a grounding, but the silent treatment. As bad as physical abuse is from a parent (and Castrée documents only one occasion of this), emotional abuse can be just as scarring, and being totally shut out is something that inspires despair from a child. It’s also part of her feeling of total alienation that is heightened as a teenager. She’s an outsider at school (as one incident involving a bloody tampon being flung into her mouth demonstrates) and is confronted by the guilt of her mother telling her she’s responsible for her relationship with her boyfriend getting worse. Things come to a head when her mother doesn’t believe Goglu is a virgin and slaps her as Omer encourages that bit of violence. The violence is almost less hurtful than the continual accusations throughout her life that she’s a liar. That leads her to being seen by a doctor and nurse who take her seriously, who note that her anger is being turned back on herself. That’s an important note to consider when reading the end of the book.

Goglu slowly, painfully makes friends in the punk scene and consoles herself by being creative. There is a heavy Julie Doucet influence at work here in more ways than one, but especially in terms of her figure drawing (while lacking Doucet’s almost neurotic need to fill up every panel with details). Indeed, it’s the negative space that most often brings home Goglu’s sense of alienation, like one beautiful page with Goglu at its center, with some art supplies and paper slowly sprawling out from around her, with nothing else on the page. It’s her only connection to the world in that moment. Doucet and other cartoonists had to have been big inspirations, with Doucet being a Canadian cartoonist who broke free of alienating and limiting relationships.

A visit to her father reveals a man who loves her but is every bit the fuck-up her mother is. In this case, however, he has a loving and supportive partner who keeps him centered, so the effect is more a case of benign neglect. He doesn’t know how to help her, but he doesn’t stand in her way, either. Things come full circle for Goglu when she becomes pregnant. Rather than being furious, her mother is supportive and helps her to get an abortion. Her mother wants to help her avoid her own fate, which may be the only really great thing she does for her as a parent. At the same time, when Omer tells them that he wants to leave because Goglu and her mother are too close “and there’s no room for me,” accepting no responsibility for his own actions, Goglu knows things are over. She’s all set to move out but her mother refuses to co-sign on a lease, which leads her to go back to her father, who builds her a log cabin in the wilderness. That last bit was powerful both as a real-world event and as a metaphor: all he can do is give her a proper setting for her loneliness and alienation in hopes that she can come to terms with it.

Castrée does not defend her own actions as a teenager, nor does she have to. She was made to feel like a hopeless failure who can’t do anything right and has a hard time getting away from internalizing that feeling. Guilt and shame are her default feelings. If the end of the book feels a little childish (“I can do whatever I want”), it’s not because she’s acting like a child who makes petulant demands. It’s because she’s finally an adult who understands that she possesses the agency she’s craved all of her life, and that she doesn’t have to stand for the emotional blackmail her mother tries to inflict on her (“Well, you’ve abandoned me…”). Susceptible seems to be the final, necessary externalization of the anger and confusion that Castrée turned inward all her life. It’s telling that it’s been thirteen years since the events at the end of the book; that seems to be enough time to process memories while still feeling the emotions attached to those memories in the present tense. Castrée is clearly not ready to forgive, even if intellectually she understands the position her mother was put in. The result is a primal howl, perhaps less a compendium of wounds than an extended expulsion of built-up bile. I’ll be curious to see how she deals with the subject of her childhood in later work, if she does indeed even choose to do so. Castrée has created something beautiful and ugly as a marker for a childhood of neglect, uncertainty, and alienation.

“At the time Lovecraft penned his stories,” wrote Psycho author Robert Bloch, “no self-styled sophisticate dare presume to take them seriously, either as literature or as a metaphor for contemporary reality.” One of Bloch’s early short stories appeared alongside The Case of Charles Dexter Ward when it ran in Weird Tales. H.P. Lovecraft’s byline had by then been frequently occurring in the magazine for nearly two decades, and his story earned prime real estate, even if he wasn’t around to see it. A cover line positioned atop the publication’s title dubbed the work “a NEW — never before published novel by LOVECRAFT.” The lengthiest of the author’s works, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward was printed in two parts, with the second half published months later. It was abridged for the magazine, and didn’t appear in full form until 1943, more than 15 years after Lovecraft finished writing it.

Charles Dexter Ward is introduced as “an antiquarian from infancy” in the original prologue to Lovecraft’s novella, which reads like a detail-rich newspaper report in the present tense, rife with specific dates and individual names that sometimes earn but a single mention. Ward’s devotion to “history, genealogy, and the study of colonial architecture, furniture, craftsmanship at length crowded everything else from his sphere of interest,” wrote Lovecraft, but this isn’t what drove Ward to the psychological deterioration that I.N.J. (Ian) Culbard suggests in the first few pages of his often grim graphic novel adaptation.

Culbard’s work opens after a winter that “saw a great change in (Charles Ward); whereby he abruptly stopped his general antiquarian pursuits and embarked on a desperate delving into occult subjects both at home and abroad, varied only by this strangely persistent search for his forefather’s grave.” Orderlies scramble inside an empty patient’s room at a hospital from which Ward has vanished. The night skies are black, softened only by swirls of serene blue tones that Ian Culbard uses to depict a lunar eclipse which coincides with Ward’s escape. Culbard follows Lovecraft’s lead in walking the narrative backward, so that the “case” of poor Charles Dexter Ward unfolds at a lethargic, stirring clip.

Hell-bent on researching the most microscopic pieces of a layered family history, Charles Ward burrows deeply into Old Providence. Lovecraft’s meticulous scene-setting is answered in the graphic novel with Ian Culbard drafting stately mansion exteriors and farmhouses in simple, slender strokes and never lending them more than two or three tones from his understated color palette. When Ward stumbles upon the records of an exporter and distant relative named Joseph Curwen, it’s a fascinating find that Culbard marks with musty diary entries, blue-gray-coded flashbacks, and sordid secondhand accounts. The story’s Curwen fled witchcraft persecutions-era Salem for Providence, gaining the trust of nearly no new neighbor in the process. Having kept late hours on his farm in order to carry out all sorts of alchemy and chemistry experiments, Joseph Curwen was “marveled at, feared, and finally shunned like a plague,” wrote Lovecraft. Townsfolk wanted nothing to do with a man who welcomed inexplicably massive numbers of livestock onto his land, from which howls and other odd guttural outbursts could be heard nightly. Worse yet, Curwen never appeared to have aged past thirty. Charles Ward’s research produced documents that dubbed him a “strange, pallid man, hardly middle-aged in aspect yet certainly not less than a full century old,” and even as Ward is transfixed, the records ultimately create a composite for Joseph Curwen that is nothing less than chilling.

Action-packed comics don’t often owe to depictions of characters sifting through moldy correspondence, deciphering archaic language, and unlocking mantras typically reserved for cellars or graveyards. The Case of Charles Dexter Ward is largely driven by words, but Ian Culbard — evidently also prone to unearthing dusty texts — has adapted several novels for the comics medium and nabbed the British Fantasy Award for Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness (2010), so he knows well how to move the author to a stylish visual format. There’s lots of talk here, yellowed newspaper cut-ins, and letter reading, each set on black pages. Culbard’s slope-chinned cast wears angular-cornered overcoats and facial expressions styled with minimal line work. They’re dead ringers for the affluent, early 20th century Brit zombies he drew for The New Deadwardians (2012), perpetually serious figures who mull documents and converse in the tall, plush chairs preferred by the era’s upper class. But within these dialogues and rigorous literary exploration lie an urgency and a textured work of horror.

Charles Ward’s obsession with Joseph Curwen accounts for a mere fraction of H.P. Lovecraft’s story — Ward’s studies doom him, ushering him into a pitch-black cycle involving sinister rituals, fits of violent paranoia, vampirism, and a conjuring of unfriendly apparitions best left to the past. Ian Culbard builds this wonderfully. The book is dotted with spare grisly sequences and a final act that materializes in catacombs framed in wordless, black-and-mold-green panels ala Alan Moore’s Cthulhu-fired Neonomicon. And while Ward’s subject grows more ghastly with the turn of every page, Lovecraft’s antiquarian can hardly resist digging further. For the reader, the feeling proves contagious.

“Operation Vaporizer” is a short sharp shock of a war/sci-fi/horror comic, narrated by a veteran reminiscing about his time with a top-secret unit that tested an experimental telepathic weapon in the jungles of Vietnam. The Full Metal Jacket-style slang (“I was in The Shit”) and the dingy green and red-orange palette root the thing to the period, providing a solid platform for diving out into the Weird.

The comic’s secret weapon is the secret weapon itself, a big round helmet with a conical, beak-like extension. It’s so simple, and so odd, that it practically demands you construct a back story for its development (my theory: Roswell aliens) — or it would, if you weren’t rooted to the spot by the horrifying simplicity of its destructive power. “Turns out all you had to do was IMAGINE your enemy’s death … and they’d VAPORIZE right there in front of you.” That’s well and good, but the real gruesome shit begins if the weapon-wielder’s concentration falters for some reason — thoughts of home, comically explicit hate-fantasies about girlfriends mid-coitus with other men, charitable feelings toward the enemy. “Then they took a lot longer to die. They’d just sort of MELT.”

That’s the strip’s vector into the goopy, textural stuff Speer usually likes to do, as evidenced by the melting plastic army man on the cover, and it translates really well into the doughy, unfussy line art he’s deploying here. But it’s also a brutal reproach to the project of war: Anything less than unwavering dedication to the act of killing results only in more brutality, psychologically agonizing for you and physically agonizing for the enemy. Still, the strip’s abrupt ending and flashback structure both point to a silver lining of sorts: If the weapon’s still a secret, that means it was never adopted as a widespread weapon of war. Human decency in the face of the war machine may lead to nothing but torment for everyone involved, but even that is an obstacle it’s not yet possible to wholly overcome.

To properly appreciate her new book Letting It Go, it helps to read her first long-form book from Drawn & Quarterly, We Are On Our Own. That’s the harrowing, unbelievable story of her mother taking her out of Hungary when the Nazis came, knowing that horrors awaited them as Jews if they stayed. It’s a story about survival in harsh conditions and pretending to be something you’re not in order to live another day. Though the book was an attempt to exorcise old pain and tell her mother’s story as well as her own, old wounds don’t always heal, no matter how they’re attended to.

That’s what Letting It Go is about, but Katin brings to this book a light and occasionally even absurdly comic touch to the proceedings. The plot is simple: Miriam’s adult son tells her that he wants to move to Berlin on a permanent basis with his girlfriend. For Miriam, this is partly a kind of betrayal and partly a parent’s nightmare of sending their child off to a place that represents the most dangerous, evil city in the world. It’s also an opportunity for Katin to examine and confront her long-held prejudices and fears, which she does in amusing and hyperbolic fashion.

The entire book is drawn in colored pencil. This adds a vibrancy and immediacy to the comic that makes it look like it was ripped right out of Katin’s sketchbook. It also allows her to shift from naturalism to a cartoonier style with little effort. Katin’s own self-caricature is one of the best I’ve ever seen from an autobiographical cartoonist. The scribbly lines of her hair, the slightly pointy nose, the tiny but wriggly eyebrows that express so much emotion and the way her posture alternates between slumped shoulders and excitedly active tell the story of a woman who is so often bursting with energy. In real life, Katin is poised, stylish, and charismatic, so it is funny to see her depict herself as slightly disheveled and neurotic in the pages of her book.

Katin’s work in this book reminds me a bit of Vanessa Davis and Carol Tyler’s autobio, reflecting a certain vivaciousness and cheerfulness of character despite the difficulties life throws their way. The book begins with a humorous meditation on Katin’s obsession with all things German and the menace they might contain: could German coffee-makers be rigged to explode? Why is it so fitting for her nemesis the German cockroach to be named as such? Despite these mild neuroses, Katin leads a pleasant enough life as a typically procrastinating cartoonist, sharing a space with her music-playing husband.

Like Tyler in her You’ll Never Know series of books, Katin has trouble beginning the story, so she simply starts in the middle so as to work back to the beginning. There’s a certain thrill to be had as a reader familiar with her work to see the scenes where she visits her elderly mother (now in her nineties) in her apartment in order to drink (“So. We drink?” “Of course!”, as Miriam adorably claps her hands together.) The book is in part about a level of intimacy so powerful that it crosses conventional manners, embarrassments, and insecurities. Those closest to you can sometimes drive you crazy (and vice versa), but in Katin’s case they provide the foundation of her life. Indeed, that’s why her son’s actions are so disturbing to her; he’s a wanderer like his mother, but she can’t understand why he’d pick Berlin in particular to make his home.

Eventually, Katin consents to visit her son and his girlfriend, meditating on her own lack of compassion for the people of Berlin after the war and comparing it to how sensitive and weepy she gets when watching certain movies. Much of the book is devoted to Katin systematically (and sometimes painfully) wrecking long-held fantasies and memories, like when she calls up a Turkish lover whom she hadn’t spoken to in fifty years to ask him about Berlin, only to be rightly reproached.

The trip itself offers almost a parody of the sort of revelations one is supposed to experience when traveling to a place fraught with meaning and symbolism. That’s brought home with a hilarious, embarrassing, disgusting, and quite lengthy scene of Katin accidentally soiling her bed and herself after eating a rich meal in Berlin. The look of horror on her face when she realizes that she’s no longer actually passing gas is played for laughs, as Berlin still managed to extract a toll of sorts on her.

Everything changes when Katin is invited back to Berlin to be part of an exhibit featuring pages from her first book. She softens on the city a bit, even altering the details of a story originally meant to make Berlin seem malevolent (her husband lost his wedding ring and thought it was stolen) to reflect the truth (he had misplaced it in some clothing). The lengths she goes to in order to look good for the art opening (whitening strips, desperately trying to lose weight) are magnified when the Icelandic volcano eruption of 2010 threatens to cancel the visit. The way she approaches the events shows just how much she let old grudges go, even if she can’t help taking one last shot at Germany when she depicts the bedbugs that chewed her up on her second visit as little creatures in suits who were doing it deliberately–and planning to conquer America!

The process of telling this story, of being confronted by her fears and hatreds because of her son’s choices, shows Katin starting to lose her rage. It’s a hard thing to keep, even in the abstract, for such a long period of time. The way she makes fun of herself for so many of her fears while still being unable to resist playing them up makes this memoir unexpectedly hilarious. One would never have expected the artist behind We Are On Our Own to have such delightful comic timing, but Katin is able to both expunge irrational but deeply held feelings and understand them for what they are. Katin transforms them into jokes, both on herself and on the country that brought her family so much pain; such humor is often the best way to root out old wounds while finding a way to distance oneself from the source of the trauma, once and for all.

Whither Julius Knipl? The book-reading public last saw Ben Katchor’s lumbering everyman, one of the last great characters of newsprint comics, in 2000’s The Beauty Supply District. In that volume’s concluding story, Knipl—flâneur, authorial stand-in, Real Estate Photographer—numbers among the select audience members present at a concert that could double as a wake for the twentieth century. The soloist performs the piece remotely, in his pyjamas, like any modern-day internet savant. Likewise, the composer has shopped out the work, to be authored by proxy, while the business that actually composed the music has gone under, victim of an economic collapse that levels these old-fashioned concerns and spawns instead a clutch of electronics wholesalers. At a reception following the concert, oblivious to the millennial restiveness around him, Knipl simply empties a jar of olives onto a plate, and wanders off into the background, unnoticed, upstaged by his own pickled fruit.

Katchor’s characters have often felt like men and women out of time, but few so much as Knipl, that reticent, bemused wanderer. He would be even more out of place in Katchor’s latest collection, Hand-Drying in America and Other Stories, which begins Knipl-y enough, with its fantasias about want ads and letter mail and the carbon copy, but which soon satirizes the glad-handing grins of the ultra-modern quick-adapter more often than it eulogizes those proudly stubborn hold-outs in the modern world. This gradual change in Katchor’s focus—from nostalgia to now, from fabricating the past to projecting the future—was probably inevitable, and takes place in fascinating fits and starts throughout this new book in a way we could never have asked of Knipl. Picture our man in the new century, schlepping a DSLR of impressive megapixelage, altering Realtor.com listings on his paper-thin tablet, checking Yelp reviews of organic malted drinks at locavore diners. No, for Knipl, that olive-spilling adieu was as timely and fitting a farewell as Fritz’s ice-pick in the back, Zuckerman’s dumping his mentor’s manuscript in the trash, Ethan Edwards’s striding off into the wilderness in The Searchers. The America to come would no longer be the one that Knipl knew.

But where has that left Katchor? Happily, just as Knipl was shrugging into his jacket, dabbing at his moustache, and making for the door, his creator was already settling into a new venue for his ruminations on city life, his mock-monographs on cheap novelties and urban decay. Starting in 1998, and continuing apace today, Katchor has presided over a full-color single page in each issue of Metropolis magazine. The bulk of these efforts—fourteen years worth of wry, restless, deeply curious cartooning—are now collected in Hand-Drying in America, and comprise a kind of Knipl sans Knipl. While the Julius Knipl feature would often give its leading man the week off and focus on some other fellow citizen, the present volume constitutes a compendium of such asides. Motley and ungovernable, the Metropolis strips bear no uniform title, and no recurring character haunts their streets. (Even Katchor’s wonderfully Uqbar-ish travelogue, The Cardboard Valise [2011], had identifiable personages around whom the author’s whims could fillip and digress.) Unlike the New Yorker or such like-minded lit mags, those traditional havens of character and storyline, the purview of Metropolis is instead architecture and design.

Creative responses to anonymous environments. From “The Goner Pillow Company,” in Hand-Drying in America.

And at first glance, Katchor’s strips fall neatly within those bounds: a series of essays on objects and their uses (“The Built-in Tissue Dispenser,” “The Miniature Trash Can”), or a learned disquisition on certain interesting edifices, like the hotel that offers an ocean view from every room. But while this work finds inspiration in such things and places—mere gadgets, glass, and concrete, one might think; lifeless, abstract—the end result is far from impersonal. Instead, the book is positively teeming with humanity, with people’s creative responses to environments that are too often anonymous, presumptuous, constraining. In having done away with Knipl, his everyman, Katchor frees himself to take on everybody.

Few books are as communal, as catch-all: every page a new hero, a new tale, a new voice. Or, rather, the same voice, a collective voice: Katchor yanks at his sentences with his characteristic taffy-pull between narration and dialogue, so that each merges into and props up the other, so that each person talks like the rest, and everyone contributes to the same conversation. A strip that begins with a narrator pondering the “velvet rope and stanchion” as “that most pernicious symbol of corporate greed,” accompanied by a management figure extolling the system’s virtues, soon opens its ranks to welcome in people off the street—“middle-aged men with hernias, unwed teenage mothers and tattooed first offenders”—who stage small, symbolic acts of rebellion, ducking under the ropes, violating the inflexible rules of the queue. “The physical expression of our free will,” they say, as Katchor draws them teetering, acrobatically off-kilter but assured in their acts of defiance. The effect is bathetic, of course—a bold “act of transgression” turned quixotic, the body awkwardly contorted to ridiculous effect and little gain—and yet Katchor, and the people who populate his America, will find their triumphs where they can.

“The physical expression of our free will.” From “Crowd Control,” in Hand-Drying in America.

Elsewhere, Katchor’s people—always the same lumpen figures, at odd angles with their surroundings, leaning into the pull of their obsessions—forge brief utopian alliances simply by reading over the shoulders of strangers (“Now we have something in common”). Or they take to “long-term window watching” with the aid of a customized pillow, weaning themselves off of electronic media, finding their new celebrities in the streets, piecing together the fragments of stories that unfold there below, discovering unwonted nuance and change and poetry all around them. They pay minute, painstaking attention to the “senseless flow of traffic” on the highway outside their city, tracking individual drivers with the fanaticism of the baseball statistician or the soap opera follower. The freeway, once dreary and commonplace, transforms into engrossing and meaningful spectacle.

Everywhere Katchor and his characters are willing to find these kinds of virtue in deadening necessity, to find meaning in the mass-produced and ascribe lofty purpose to the baldly pointless. “Let us celebrate the unique sound of each city’s garbage collection while we still can,” implores the narrator in one strip, while in another a man teaches his son the niceties of hasty “slop work,” the finer points of shoddy renovations, inculcating in the boy a sense of awe at human impermanence and cheapness. Garbage collection, slop work, hand-drying in America: meaning proliferates in Katchor’s world, where all of our activities become imbued with rich, suggestive significance, where each seemingly colorless social convention is in fact one more node in a vast people’s history. An emblem for his work, then: a panel from a strip entitled “Memorial City,” where “the sidewalks are encrusted with commemorative plaques,” and a pedestrian halts, immobile, eyes cast downward, frozen in contemplation of the dozens, hundreds of negligible stories intrinsic to every inch of urban space spread before him.

An emblem for the cartoonist’s work. From “Memorial City”—also the source of one of Katchor’s theatrical collaborations—in Hand-Drying in America.

One suspects the world, for Katchor, is similarly encrusted. Every object, every occasion, gives rise to some insight, whether it’s buying shoes, holding an elevator door, or reaching for a paper towel that isn’t there. Two of the strongest pieces in the book revolve around the legacy and import of the sardine key, used to open tins of fish in an era before pull-tabs, and the history of the over-sized magazine (self-reflexive, that: the first strips in the book hail from the period when Metropolis was still published in decadent proportions, before shrinking down shortly after Katchor’s arrival). The cartoonist acknowledges the diminished quality of our experiences with either commodity today, but chooses to ignore this contemporary triviality in favor of a deep engagement with them as historical objects. He revivifies these artifacts of a now-ancient culture, allowing them to speak out of the past about their accomplishments and genealogies, remarking on the way that magazines inhabited the homes of their readers (Life spilling out of suburban magazine racks, Interview splayed on coffee tables in converted lofts), or the way the sardine can metaphorized the constraints of modern urban life, while its key embodied the promise of escape and relief.

These are the trappings of Knipl’s America, however, the bygone glories of yesteryear. They provoke a valorizing of the vanished past that may be tongue-in-cheek—a kind of ironic sepia-tone—but that tone remains wistful and elegiac all the same. More pointed, and less heroic, are Katchor’s encounters with the widgets and presumptions and falsifications of today. The artist’s more recent strips, especially after he abandons ink and wash and begins to draw with digital tools, are tales that no longer cast back into the past, but rather prognosticate and forewarn—tea-leaf readings that are more bitter dregs than sweetened fortunes. Set in our proximate future, if not some tweaked semblance of today (one strip tells of a condo housing a sweatshop in the year 2014), the final movements of Hand-Drying in America carry out with the same tone of resigned revulsion on display in a film like Idiocracy (2006), or the aloof indignation of Swift’s infamous proposal.

In these pages, Katchor gets to indulge in science-fiction snippets of how we might live now and in the years to come, where labor seems invisible, capital seems indomitable, and life takes place on-screen. Our prophet foretells of office-buildings modeled after extreme sports or poultry farms, where workers rock-climb to their appointments, or get crammed into ill-lit holes of misery, heavily dosed with drugs so they can hallucinate a happier, more spacious workplace. There are CEOs legislated into visiting each outlet of their business for fifteen minutes each day (Katchor draws with gleeful schadenfreude the bedraggled, urine-soaked billionaire that results from this state of affairs). There are middle-class families who choose to decorate their homes “in the style of ‘emergency preparedness’”, all sirens and eye-wash stations and chemical toilets, or who garb themselves in rubber boots and overalls, distrustful of the impermanence of consumer goods.

A challenge is posed. From “An International Competition,” in Hand-Drying in America.

Strikingly, in the final strip of the book (aside from the meta-commentary Katchor loads into the endpapers and covers), the cartoonist draws together all the strands he has lately been following—the digital, the global, the historical. The page uses the graphics-overload of the cable news broadcast as a starting point from which to discuss the history of television journalism, the media’s blinkered politics, the public’s short-term memory—even the semiotics of the mid-century necktie. All this information is arrayed in a way that echoes the “frenetic display” of the CNN-style screens it purports to be about: at least five distinct locations and timeframes circle the page, from Moscow to Riyadh, from the ’50s to now, with each fragment poised on top of and beside the other. No one setting takes precedence over another, and there is no unique way to properly navigate the page. A challenge is posed: how will we make sense of what’s before us? How will we find our way through the avalanche of information that’s no longer just on the streets around us, encrusted on the sidewalks like those commemorative plaques in Memorial City, but beamed now too into our living rooms, our laptops, our palms? What meaning can be distilled from all this vacuous, aimless babble?

In this new landscape, Katchor no longer provides readers with a guide—none of his gesticulating street lecturers appear, no hucksters, no familiars, no Knipl. Instead, positioned centrally we find one viewer, bathed in the blue light of the screen, neck craned toward the newscast, listening to an anchor tell us first of a senator’s indictment, then his imprisonment, and his inevitable presidential campaign. “The constant visual activity,” the captions read, “seems to displace the need for a coherent chain of thought.”  The viewer’s face registers no reaction, no change. Hand-Drying in America lays out the world before us, in all its varieties and colors and confusions and fragments, just like that television screen: sure, yes, pay attention, be enraptured, be that viewer. But don’t forget to think about what we see, to reflect on it, and spin off into wild supposition, historical speculation. Even if—especially if—we cannot make it cohere.

But as with all movements, there are subtleties at work inside. Where, for example, do you draw the line between beautiful, progressive, inspiring depictions of super-women and male gaze-y delineations apt for passive consumption in reinforcement of the status quo? Eh? It’s a hard question to ask of a historically male-dominated art form, one often linked by dint of influence and shared commercial status to the great illustration artists of the 20th century, some of the them practitioners of “Good Girl Art,” as the comics fans dubbed it. Nominally corn-fed and perky in presentation, Good Girl Art carries a dual charge, insofar as its idealized forms extol health and beauty and joy, while also foregrounding the exclusionary necessities of catering to male titillation.

Naturally, this latter capacity can be read as a paternalistic dictation of feminine norms to a populace who weren’t consulted on how they’d prefer to look, yet superheroes have a way of frustrating the discourse. Can’t a well-built woman inspire and empower, even from the very drawing of her? Does lady-driven cosplay not thrill in the flash and poise of it all? Don’t some women find these images beautiful, or sexually appealing? Can’t the dreams of men and women coincide?

Reverie is critical to Muse — originally titled Songes, or “Dreams” — a new collection of bandes dessinées drawn by Terry Dodson, a prolific 20-year veteran of the American superhero scene. It is fruitless to summarize such a long career in just a few sentences, but I think it’s fair to suppose that an artist who’s titled his homepage “The Bombshellter” is best known for his drawings of women, specifically the kind of top-heavy heroines who all but erupt, at times, from their tight ensembles, bounding into action with a twinkle and grin. But unlike the similarly-interested examples of Guillem March (who faced a terrific blowback over a Catwoman cover last year) or Adam Hughes (widely admired yet also prominently criticized), Dodson has evaded any wide denunciation for sins of depiction. He is one of “the good ones” – the girlie artists whose commitment to high-quality drawing supersedes more fundamental qualms over their aesthetics.

Fans of the stuff have anticipated this particular book for years now, as its French-language serial debut in 2006 promised a less subgenre-driven (and a more R-rated) platform for Dodson’s art; its concluding half went cruelly unreleased until 2012. Perhaps cognizant of this delay, Dodson has since declined to renew his exclusive contract with Marvel, and appears to be focusing primarily on European-market work, albeit with an eye toward speedy English translation; one guesses he found the experience of Muse, however prolonged, to be agreeable. Certainly the project’s English-language publisher, Humanoids, intends this 9.5” x 11.5” all-in-one hardcover to be a showpiece of lush, laborious art.

I think the above detail gamely identifies the appeal and the faults of the Terry Dodson style. The girl looks nice enough — like Milo Manara and Frank Quitely, Dodson has a tendency to draw not so much women as variations on a single, “ultimate” woman in a variety of outfits and hairdos; this is apropos to a work titled Muse — and he has a flair for exaggerated gestures that occasionally compensate for the lack of motion in his sequencing, though he cannot salvage the entirely motion-based joke that is the lowest tier of panels. It actually took me multiple reads to figure out that the lecherous dude photographing Coraline, our heroine, had fallen from his eerily still perch — floating leaves blowing stiffly above it — because everything in Dodsen’s panels is fussed-over and lacquered like animation backgrounds in a world without cels. Much (if not all) of the book was colored by Dodson & Rebecca Rendon directly from pencils, but this doesn’t lend the art any feeling of spontaneity, only a vaguely soft texture more easily overwhelmed by glossy digital hue.

Or, to better elaborate:

I’m generally down for a good oil-massage scene, but the effect here is frustrated because Dodson’s bodies are already so plastic — hell, those breasts appear to be hard as ceramic, which must be murder on the back — and the coloring so rich and heavy, that it’s absolutely impossible to distinguish moist skin from dry. And, like it or not, we are trapped with the stasis of sexy Coraline – never glistening in the frequent heat, never tottering through her myriad strippings, her ample bosom quavering nary an inch through her several under-dressed pursuits. Thank heavens splashing water offers its own dynamism! I know, of course, that you wouldn’t catch Bettie Page perspiring either, but there’s tactile expectations to bodies traveling in environments, and while you can excuse eternal cool in a superhero comic — which isn’t really about bodies-as-bodies anyway — a book this obsessed with a particular set of curves could do better than merely state the dimensions over and over.

Nonetheless, the boys can’t keep their hands off ‘em:

Indeed, for as fizzy a thing at it presents itself to be, Muse is actually pretty fucking sinister for a good chunk of its page count. Veteran BD scriptwriter Denis-Pierre Filippi establishes a formula early, and sticks to it for about ¾ of the book: Coraline, hired as the new governess for a brilliant, moody, rich little boy, wanders around the sparkling grounds of the lad’s steam-powered estate, her good-hearted naiveté clashing with her charge’s self-serious nature, and then she’s somehow given a mysterious elixir and falls into a humorous dream set in the midst of some popular genre – piracy, jungle adventure, fairy stories a la Zenescope, etc. She loses much of her clothing, narrowly avoids sexual assault, slaps someone, and then wakes up.

A more provocative critic might be tempted to describe much of the book as a lighthearted look at rape threats toward a drugged woman, but Filippi is attempting to play a long game with his plot; I don’t want to give it all away, but rest assured that such naughty fantasies are duly criticized as juvenile, and that Coraline is not nearly as helpless as she seems. Which is another way of saying the plot is critic-proofed like Dodson’s bodies are sweat-resistant – complain about the content, and Filippi merely nods. “I agree,” he says, raising an eyebrow at another poor soul who Didn’t Get It.

In situations like this, it is useful to examine the counter-plan suggested by the authors, their “response” to the dominant paradigm they are largely working in yet ostensibly criticizing. The final ¼ of Muse, however, is still a barrage of underdressed women frolicking amidst bodily peril — now with added lesbian undertones! — but with a more focused plan for fighting back against their dream-time aggressors. This used to be called “eating your cake and having it too,” but a more charitable interpretation would position Filippi & Dodson as exploring the very dual charge described above, and demonstrating how character motivation can transform identical visual tropes from exploitation to empowerment.

Yet this smut fan remains unsatisfied.

Years ago, Vittorio Giardino created a girlie comic titled Little Ego, a playful and parodic (yet distinctly dangerous) exploration of a woman’s erotic unconscious. Central to the exercise is that the heroine’s dreams are fundamentally her own: reflections of her sexual appetite. To me, this is linked to my favorite type of Good Girl Art, an approach that often fetishises women in peril, or aggressive, wicked women — the “Good” does not apply to the Girl’s personality, but to the male viewer’s appreciation of her body — but can also celebrate the barely-concealed licentious side of women whose lapses in demureness don’t especially detract from their character. In every movement, again, there are subtleties at work.

Muse is not really like any of that. It’s probably closest to the much-derided (if conceptually misunderstood) 2011 Zack Snyder movie Sucker Punch, which similarly plopped pretty girls down in a series of terrible dreams modeled after genre-tinged platforms for objectification, arguably contributing more to said objectification than the opposition of such. Filippi & Dodson are not as willing to go to creepy extremes as Snyder & co., but in their rush to repel the fetish imagery they’ve deliberately evoked they also act to deny their heroine any sexual agency, any desire. Cartoonist Adam Warren’s Empowered is similarly awash in potentially objectionable images, but it always portrays its own heroine as a player in the game of sex, with a full set of growling needs and peccadilloes. Coraline, in contrast, is just set dressing for metaphor.

But then, that is how she’s drawn: an icon indistinguishable from her Art Nouveau Disney Princess steampunk environs. Scratch the above paragraph – what’s really brought to mind is the mise-en-scène of Snyder classmate Michael Bay, who frequently compares images of women to those of, say, really nice cars. It’s all stimulation. Who could imagine Megan Fox having an orgasm in Transformers? That’s not her function. Look, but do not touch, because what you’ll feel is plain as drafting paper. These are depictions of women for distanced men, content with their appreciation of air-conditioned museum pieces behind the clear glass of the fourth wall.

Shite, I thought. Is this going to be completely trite Euronoir like Blacksad, a pile of clichés enlivened only by the gimmick of giving stock characters animal heads?

I am not against Euronoir per se; it’s interesting to see how Europeans construct imaginary Americas. I am European myself, and find the America I live in today is rarely the one stories told me to expect. Sometimes Europeans build America very well, as in a Humanoids release from a decade ago, Miss: Better Living Through Crime. Sometimes they do it not so well, as in the aforementioned Blacksad, in which cliché is heaped upon cliché as a detective who for no good reason has a cat’s head investigates uninteresting mysteries featuring other anthropomorphic characters. There’s a very good drawing of a hand on page 15 of the first volume of Blacksad but that’s about as much good as I can say about it.

But although it does feature talking beasts, District 14 goes beyond the mere accumulation of ancient tropes and exhausted set pieces. For a start, it mixes up humans and animals. They live alongside each other in the vast location of the title, which owes something to Fritz Lang’s Metropolis in its sense of scale, but which is a little less futuristic in design. Airships drift between impossibly tall buildings, but the entrances, columns and interiors are rather French-classical. Meanwhile Gabus and Reutimann resist the urge to go for a simple metaphor with this blending of human and animal characters- there’s no (human) master race lording it over the (bestial) untermenschen here, for instance. The different species just, well, live together.

So what’s the point?

Well, I wasn’t entirely sure until I reached a marvelous sequence where the central characters visit a jungle that is growing in the upper reaches of one of the ultra-skyscrapers. Down below, naked animal-men are reverting to their original state, and lie around in a jungle, murdering people and eating their entrails. That was when I noticed that the other animal characters retain their bestial characteristics, even though they wear suits and hold down jobs: thus rhinoceros enforcers are very short-sighted, tadpole gangsters are very easy to kill, and frogs have very long tongues. There is thus a strange logic at play, almost a thought experiment: what if animals did live alongside humans in a vast metropolis? It’s hardly a question I ask myself every day, but Gabus and Reutimann do ask it, ponder the consequences, and then allow the effects to unfold within their story, thus enriching the texture of their imaginary world.

That same interest in adding disparate, contrasting story/genre elements and then allowing the consequences to develop gradually— and to modify the direction of the story— is applied throughout the book. For as District 14 progresses over its 300 or so pages, Gabus and Reutimann toss an exceedingly violent Golden Age masked crime fighter into the mix, then refugees from another galaxy, then a cat with mysterious powers— and each time their fictional universe is modified the narrative shifts. The bounds of genre are loosened and District 14 moves from straight-up noir pastiche to a complex fusion of multiple story types, in which (for instance) the rules of noir and SF and events of European history rub up against the other. Of course it’s not strange to blend genres in comics, but Gabus and Reuitmann are more varied and eclectic than most in their selection, and keeping all that material on track requires considerable skill and judgment.

My favorite element in the book is probably the riff on the popular French children’s character Babar: in his short foreword to the book Jeff Smith jokingly references Jean de Brunhoff’s books (“The authors are French after all”) but in fact, I think the “joke” is rather wry and well-worked out. It’s implied at the beginning and for most of the book that “Michael Elizondo” the elephant protagonist is an anarchist refugee who has assassinated a prince or archduke. This is a direct inversion of Babar, the wise philosopher king and architect of a pachyderm utopia, whose history of benevolent authoritarian leadership is well known to all French kids and indeed anyone who has read de Brunhoff’s magnum opus, Babar the King.

The full effect is probably lost on Anglophone readers, but I think here the same principle is in play as a Crumb or Kim Deitch telling adult stories using animal characters reminiscent of the types found in kids’ cartoons of their youth. Here however the effect is less abrasive, less willfully shocking- rather it is subtly political, even melancholy. The naïve elephant’s paradise of the kids’ stories is parodied and indeed inverted by this vast, violent, corrupt cityscape, existing on an unfathomable, impossible scale, where even an elephant is dwarfed and atomized by his surroundings: yes, children, this is the loneliness you can expect when you grow up. At the end of the book however Gabus and Reutimann surprise the reader regarding the elephant’s true identity, and the narrative starts to flow in a new direction.

District 14 then is a rather interesting and unusual exercise in ultra-eclectic world building that utilizes elements from German silent cinema, French kids’ books, noir, SF, pulp, superheroes, European history and assorted imaginary Americas. In this breadth of range the book goes further than most attempts at cross-genre fusion. Maybe only League of Extraordinary Gentleman: Century adds as many (or more) disparate elements, but Gabus and Reutimann are a lot more disciplined than Alan Moore and there is no Mary Poppins showing up to save the day in a spectacularly lazy denouement. Perhaps they had an editor who actually edited. With so many different ingredients, the book could easily have gone badly wrong both tonally and plot-wise, but Gabus and Reuitmann make it to the end without jumping any narrative sharks.

The story is baroque, filled with twists and turns, but the deeper mysteries surrounding the characters unfold at a leisurely pace. By the end of the 300 pages of “Season One” we are still a long way from reaching the conclusion, though a lot has happened in the meantime. In short, District 14 is well-written, it looks good, and it probably deserved the prize for best series it won at Angoulême last year. Perhaps my review has made it sound like an Oubapo-esque exercise in formalism, but it doesn’t read that way. Indeed, you could forget all of that cross-genre intermingling stuff and still enjoy the book as a well-executed yarn. And there’s nothing wrong with that, either.

Oh, look, a Great Comic.

Ant Comic, Michael DeForge’s magnum opus (so far; give him time), tackles the big issues—sex, war, parenthood, family, labor, love, the Other, death—with such brio and ease that it’s more like a shopper methodically checking items off his grocery list in a supermarket he knows like the back of his hand than an artist grappling with the stickiest issues imaginable. That’s because, in this story about a handful of insects living in a black ant colony that makes a disastrous decision to go to war with the red ants who live nearby, he’s found the perfect vessel for all his preexisting preoccupations as a cartoonist.

Take his penchant for crafting baroque, inside-out character designs. Even in comics where the sartorial weirdness is the point, like Leather Space Man or Canadian Royal Family, DeForge can hit a point where the complexity of the drawing undercuts, or rather overwhelms, its communicative value. In Ant Comic, however, the bizarre visual interpretations of the bugs in question are pitch-perfect distanciation techniques, driving home their alien biology by depicting them in ways we’ve never seen, not even close. Spiders are just fanged cartoon dog heads with eight legs sticking out of them; centipedes look like the world’s longest stretch Hummer limos; worms resemble sex toys from the Gimp’s treasure chest and emit a constant stream of mindless ha-ha-ha-ha laughter; fruit flies are multi-eyed entities that look like they erupted out of a carcass in Johnny Ryan’s Prison Pit; the ants themselves sport visible internal organs in an array of bright colors, like anatomical models; the queen of the colony is a behemoth, a tangle of canals and orifices before which the males of the colony queue up and into which they enter three by three to deposit their ejaculate — an EPCOT Center attraction designed by Salvador Dalí at his most trollish. Only the red ants actually resemble what we might think of when we think of the insect in question, although they’re so busy forming a sex-death cult centered on the consumption of hallucinogenic spider semen deposited into a decoy made from black-ant carcasses that you might not even notice.

The power of these designs fuels the deployment of another one of DeForge’s go-to techniques: juxtaposing grotesque and high-stakes events with blasé, workaday reactions by the characters involved. Ants reference going to shop class in conversations about ingesting ant poison and going insane. Non-queen females reminisce about forbidden dalliances with male ants like confessional blog posts at XOJane while wandering a wasteland after fleeing the colony while the queen slowly decomposes and dies. A gay couple breaks up like any couple might, even as they attempt to rebuild their society from the ground up with just them, a cop who went AWOL from the big battle, a child whose consumption of earthworm particles has given him prophetic powers, and a baby red ant none of them can understand.

It all fits: Ant Comic is an existential horror story about going through the motions. Life is boiled down to the precious few biological drives ants possess—reproducing, eating, killing threats—which in turn become the social mechanisms that drive the entire colony. Even when they are totally undone by this tag team of id and superego, even when they quite openly address the inadequacy of everything they’ve done in the past and are attempting to do in the future, they still can’t do anything but fight, fuck, eat, and hope that doing so provides…enough. And lest you think there’s some alternative available, the one survivor who chooses not to play by the rules, the prophet child’s father, gradually reveals himself to be a “some men just want to watch the world burn”-style sociopath. It’s all colored like a firework display, yet somehow I don’t feel like celebrating—do you?

Ant Comic marked the moment I stopped giving a shit about print. At least, showed me I didn’t have to give a shit about print, not anymore, not if I didn’t feel like it or couldn’t afford it or couldn’t swing the shelf space. With each new page he posted, Michael DeForge demonstrated that the web is as efficient, and sufficient, a delivery mechanism for artcomics as print, just as surely as The Sopranos proved week in and week out that TV could do drama on the level of cinema. That he initially did it without really leaning on any of the inherent characteristics of webcomics—continuous scrolling, inventive formatting—only speaks higher of the robustness of the medium, and DeForge’s talent.

Indeed, the central tension of the comic is that despite her physical and emotional advances on the man, Eulalia, the mermaid who visits and beguiles Warren, does nothing to try to pry him loose from that moment. Her eyes black orbs, her breast milk a black ichor, she kisses him, holds him, alternately taunts and comforts him, but ultimately allows his fate to unfold just as it would had he never met her at all. The merfolk we encounter banter about their vaguely avant-garde music projects (“It’s still basically noise but with dance beats”) and make sex jokes (“These young guys probably wouldn’t even know where to put it.” “Well, to be fair … probably none of them would know where to put it”) while, yards away or above, people die. They appear to understand the facts of human death, but see it as something in which they feel no compunction to intervene, any more than we would attempt to wall off anthills from rivulets of hot soapy water when someone’s washing their car. Only Warren’s spectral visit to his wife back home on the night of his death, and the salty black traces of himself his spectre leaves behind after they have sex one last time, provides any evidence of his encounter with the preternatural that can be observed outside the boat and the depths beneath — a world hermetically sealed by vastness and isolation, and a yawning gulf of understanding between everyday forces and the forces beyond them.

But the tenderness between Eulalia and Warren is nevertheless real in that moment. You don’t even have to take the dialogue’s word for it — Eulalia’s canny ability to be direct or withdrawn depending on the emotional needs of the moment, say, or her mothering comfort when Warren cries, or her repetitive “oh no no no no no” when the inevitable finally arrives. No, just watch their fingers flex and grip and intertwine as they hold hands, passing the time by recalling Warren’s one-time dalliances with a crewmate. (By this point we’ve sussed out that they’re maybe not so one-time, but that’s as may be.) The connection is, to them, literally palpable. If the only transcendence on offer here is a black transcendence, a liberation from the physical plane by a massive school of tiny black fish that devour and disperse in the comic’s knockout final image, that doesn’t make that connection any less valuable — just valuable in a different way. Gfrörer’s most moving comic to date, Black Is the Color eroticizes suffering not to glamorize it, but to endure it. We’re adrift; what other choice do we have?

Before we plunge further into this review, I should alert you to the biases I bear that may affect my opinion of the book. Kitchen has been acting as my agent for several years in an effort to find a publisher for my own Capp book, Hubris and Chutzpah, about the sensational feud between Capp and Ham Fisher, creator of Joe Palooka, a strip equal to Li’l Abner in popularity but entirely different in its themes. Despite many years of trying, Kitchen has been unable to find a publisher, and so I’ve published the book myself, posting it to my website, RCHarvey.com (in the Hindsight department) just about the time the Schumacher-Kitchen book came out. So my biases, however discernible they may be, spring, on the one hand, from a long and friendly relationship with Kitchen; on the other hand, from his failure to find a publisher for my book. (To be fair, I wasn’t pushing him very hard at any time because I was always so deeply into other projects I could not have spared much time to do the book even if he’d found a publisher. I don’t think I’m at all miffed about this, but maybe I am and don’t know it.)

Then there’s the fact of my book co-existing with theirs. “Natcherly” (as Li’l Abner would say), my book is better; theirs, perforce, must not be as good. Or so it would seem. (But my book focuses on only one aspect of Capp’s protean life; theirs, on many for facets of that life. And besides, theirs is very good indeed.)

Having now raked up all the scruples I can think of, we can dash headlong into a review. Whether these confessed biases influence my attitudes about the Schumacher-Kitchen book for the better or for the worse you must decide for yourself as you plow through the review that ensues.

The chief occurrences of Capp’s life are treated in great detail: the loss of his left leg at the age of nine and the probable psychological consequences; his education at a succession of art schools he was too poor to pay tuition to; his apprenticeship to Ham Fisher and the dispute about who created the hillbilly Big Leviticus in Joe Palooka; the resulting feud, its nastiness, and Fisher’s attempt to smear Capp’s reputation; Capp’s emergence as a pop culture celebrity; his shrill attacks on the New Student Left on college campuses; his notorious visit to John Lennon and Yoko Ono; the subliminal eroticism in Li’l Abner; Capp’s extracurricular sex life, preying upon show girls and college co-eds, and his fall from grace as a result. In every instance, the book offers insights into these events that are new to me (and I’ve researched Capp’s life for my book, at least as much as publicly available documents permit).

About Capp’s womanizing, for instance, I learned that for over a year (1940-41) he conducted an affair with a young singer in California. The book quotes from her letters to him (found, I assume, among Capp’s papers) and, remarkably, from his letters to her, obtained from the daughter of the woman in question. This was no simple dalliance: they were obviously in love. The authors also interviewed Patricia Harry, the University of Wisconsin co-ed whose misadventure with Capp became national news when she sued him. Her detailed account of the rape is chilling and disgusting—and entirely new; until reading it, I had assumed, with the rest of the world, that the charges against Capp were all about his attempts (attempted adultery and attempted sodomy [oral sex]) rather than his debatable “success” in sexually assaulting her.

With the detail of these two revelations in mind, it is remarkable that the authors’ treatment of the erotic images in Li’l Abner is so restrained. Fisher accused Capp of making pornography, and one of the issues raised by the accusation was whether Capp had drawn the pictures in question. Capp denied it. And his friends in the National Cartoonists Society (including Alex Raymond and Milton Caniff) supported him in his denial. Wikipedia asserts that the dirty pictures are forged. Not so. Capp did, indeed, draw the pictures; and in my book, I provide visual evidence to support this contention.

Schumacher and Kitchen agree that Capp drew the offending pictures albeit their assertion is considerably more circumspect than mine: “For discerning readers, including Fisher, Capp’s frequent visual and verbal double entendres were indisputable, but they were always clever enough to be ambiguous and thus fly below the radar of the vast majority of unassuming readers.” In support of this view, they reprint a couple of the tamer specimens, both of which I’ve included in my book. I also include many others, most of which are much more blatant comedic examples of sexual imagery in the strip, albeit still equivocal and subject to alternative interpretation. Clever, as they say.

Schumacher and Kitchen navigate their way through the porn episode by focusing mostly on the second issue that Fisher’s accusation raised: was he the person who circulated carefully cropped panels from the Li’l Abner strip to newspaper editors, claiming the pictures showed that Capp was a pornographer and urging that the editors therefore drop the strip? And did Fisher send those same images in 1951 to a New York state legislative committee investigating comics? By this indirection, Schumacher and Kitchen avoid dealing at length with the more scandalous aspect of the affair—namely, that Capp was producing subliminal pornography. My answer, as I’ve said, is that he most assuredly was. That’s their answer, too, but circumspectly stated, as we’ve seen.

As for Fisher’s hand in the affair, Schumacher and Kitchen decide, as I have, that Fisher did smear Capp by circulating the incriminating pictures. The National Cartoonists Society reached the same conclusion and  suspended Fisher for conduct unbecoming of a member. At the time, with Fredric Wertham blathering on about comic books turning children into blood-thirsty criminals or drooling sex maniacs, Fisher’s distributing nasty pictures purportedly being drawn in a daily newspaper comic strip threatened all syndicated cartoonists as well as comic book publishers. Fisher, humiliated by the suspension, could no longer go out in public, visiting fashionable night spots to play the role essential to his ego—that of the cartoonist celebrity. Within a year, he’d committed suicide.

An explanation for the gingerly way the authors deal with Capp’s career as a pornographic prankster may be that the Capp family—his widow, daughter, and grandchildren—didn’t want this dirty linen aired, and since Schumacher and Kitchen depended upon their help (giving access to Capp’s papers and being interviewed), the authors may have been reluctant, understandably, to upset their sources. Kitchen explained in an interview with Michael Dooley at imprint.printmag.com:

I’m afraid there were a good number of things that key members of his family resisted having us include. In some cases, out of genuine respect for their feelings, we truncated excerpts from letters—in particular, a discarded suicide note—because Capp’s invective was so bitter and personal. We also agreed, for example, to eliminate a raunchy story that Frank Frazetta once related to me. In some cases, the evidence for certain alleged events was not enough for us to be comfortable stating as fact, so such elements didn’t make the cut for evidentiary reasons. But in most cases, we included fact-based controversial material over their objection.

“I’ve known the family for years,” Kitchen continued, “and felt we had become friends. So when I started this biography, I assured them that we were very serious and that it would be a ‘warts and all’ biography. To their credit, they cooperated fully and provided access to most of the surviving papers and correspondence. But I don’t think they realized what other people had on Capp. When they finally read our draft manuscript, they made it clear they were hoping we downplayed his dark side and portrayed the later years more sympathetically.”  

But Schumacher and Kitchen persisted and were finally given permission to use even copyrighted material without any conditions except for including a disclaimer on the book’s copyright page:

“Neither Capp Enterprises, Inc., nor any affiliates, including members of the family of Al Capp, attests to the accuracy of any statements, facts, or conclusions set forth by the authors. Capp Enterprises, Inc., in no way endorses the content of the book nor does it imply that the book is in any way an authorized biography of Al Capp.”

Pretty severe, you’d think; but, given some of Capp’s adventures related therein, the disclaimer amounts to a ringing affirmation of the book’s accuracy. The essence of all of Capp’s career, if not in every sordid detail (but in detail enough), is here, at long last.

Schumacher and Kitchen have squelched rumor and hearsay with reasoned argument and persuasive fact. The result is a genuinely impressive and authoritative insight into an overlooked but morbidly fascinating corner of comics history.

Their resolution of the hillbilly dispute that prompted the Capp-Fisher feud is similarly satisfying. They credit both Capp and Fisher with aspects of the creation of Big Leviticus while also concluding the Capp’s version of the story is probably more fiction than fact—something that was often true of Capp’s accounts of events in his life.

In their Big Leviticus scenario, Schumacher and Kitchen endorse both sides of the debate by knitting a few known facts together with a few reasonable speculations and adding some probably fictional connective tissue to create a cohesive story. In their conclusion, they decide for Fisher. They suppose that Capp brought the idea of hillbillies to story conferences with Fisher, and Fisher, even though not initially keen about using such characters, wrote a script for the Big Leviticus adventure. In support of this contention, the biographers cite a long-standing custom in the syndicate business that cartoonists submit scripts to their syndicates for approval 6-8 weeks before scheduled publication.

This interpretation of events is as plausible as any other. But the explanation is scarcely leak-proof. Not all syndicated comic strip cartoonists were required forever by their syndicates to submit scripts for approval in advance. And by 1933, Fisher’s strip was roaringly successful; it’s at least probable that he wouldn’t have been expected to get approval in advance for his stories. Moreover, in support of Capp’s version of events, Big Leviticus’ behavior is more akin to the sort of comedy Capp would later develop in Li’l Abner than anything Fisher had done or would do.

Still, Schumacher and Kitchen find it highly unlikely that Fisher, a notoriously fussy man, would have permitted his “brand new assistant” to solo on the Big Leviticus story so soon after joining Fisher; the Big Leviticus story appeared in late October, and Capp had joined Fisher only five or six months earlier.

Schumacher is the chief writer of the book; Kitchen, the researcher and fact-checker.  “After decades of seeking,” Kitchen told me, “I had amassed a full file cabinet, several binders and about six storage boxes of newspaper, magazine articles, interviews, photos, clippings, correspondence, an unpublished autobiography, and ephemera of all kinds. And I had been talking to [Capp’s] associates and relatives for years. That was my primary contribution. Once we agreed to co-author, we divvied up the new interviews and shared everything. And Michael is the more experienced writer, so he did all the first drafts, then we’d go back and forth until we were both happy.”

Schumacher’s narrative manner is novelistic. He often says what Capp and others “thought” or “suspected” or “hoped.,” creating a mildly annoying nag at the back of the scholarly reader’s brain. Clearly, he cannot know what these people were thinking or what they suspected. But he is a thorough-going professional and he works within the biographers tradition, speculating reasonably from the evidence of letters and interviews and the like. And his style, brisk and confident, persuades me that he knows what he’s talking about even when he seems, impossibly, to be inside the heads of his subjects.

Despite such quibbles, I enjoyed the book immensely, and I learned many things I never knew. The authors go into some detail in describing the functioning of Capp Enterprises, for instance—the entity Capp established to merchandise his creations. Several sections of the book reveal the seemingly endless quarreling between Capp and his brother Bence, the chief operating officer of Capp Enterprises.

The book offers details about Capp’s family life, his love for his wife and children, and his business practices and publicity schemes, his toying with running against Ted Kennedy for a Senate seat, his tv show and guest appearances on talk shows, the creation of the Broadway musical “Li’l Abner” and the movie version thereof, a Fearless Fosdick tv puppet show that failed.

Throughout, tantalizing tid-bits are dangled. Capp and his assistants talked “Dogpatch lingo” in the studio. Capp’s early sketches for the Kigmy, a successor to the shmoo that encouraged irrate people to kick it to relieve their rage, was at first a much more overtly satirical character: it had a dark-skinned face with a prominent nose—visual shorthand for African Americans and Jews, two minorities often kicked around. There was a Fearless Fosdick tv puppet show that failed.

There are occasional lapses in accuracy albeit nothing major. Capp was awarded the NCS trophy as Cartoonist of the Year in 1948, not 1947; the award was for his achievement in 1947 and therefore carries that date, but it was actually given in the spring of 1948. A minor matter, surely, but the authors hinge this event to another—the first of a two-part profile of Capp in The New Yorker that began in November 1947, implying that the conferring of the award prompted the article. Impossible.

Another minuscule quibble: the Fisher legend is that he went on the road himself to sell Joe Palooka. Schumacher and Kitchen say this occurred in 1928, implying that the strip started about then; but Joe Palooka didn’t begin until 1930, April 21.

The book portrays Milton Caniff as buying whole-heartedly into Capp’s contention that his sexual assault of a co-ed in Wisconsin was a frame-up by angry lefty students. True but not quite. Caniff was quite aware of his friend’s sexual proclivities. Although out of loyalty and friendship, Caniff contended that Capp had been the victim in the incident, at the very same time, he strongly suspected that Capp was guilty as charged. Capp’s mistake, Caniff believed, had been in approaching “amateurs.”

“Al was down in New York every week and sometimes for weeks at a time, having his fun,” he told me. “He had some good lookin’ broads, believe me. They all flocked to him, thinking that he could do them some good in their careers. He seldom got caught because he didn’t have anything to do with amateurs: the women he squired around town here were obviously gals on the make—showgirl types, gals who wanted to be seen with celebrities. The old badger game he fell into in Wisconsin could have happened only in a place like Wisconsin—not around New York City.

“Al had a strangely naive attitude about himself,” Caniff went on. “He thought he could come down here to New York and play around with these babes and no one would say anything. Once when a gossip column mentioned his being seen with Miss Hootenanny or some such, he was shocked. He thought the ‘boys’ would protect him. He thought the Winchells and all the others would—out of professional courtesy—not mention anything. But those guys would turn on their own mothers. So it got to be sticky: [his wife] Catherine also read the papers. Everyone just kind of avoided the subject.”  

In 1947, Capp famously sued his syndicate, United Feature—for $14 million. But we never learn what, exactly, was the outcome. A “favorable resolution” was reached, Schumacher and Kitchen tell us, but what that was, exactly, we never learn. My guess, based upon other sources, is that part of the resolution was that Capp was promised eventual ownership of the strip. And in 1964, just after he acquired ownership, he took Li’l Abner to another syndicate, the Chicago Tribune-Daily News, where he negotiated an even better deal.

At least one other tid-bit the authors bring up but leave dangling. They mention the name Nancy O., which Capp began dropping, unexplained, into corners of the strip in the fall of 1948. The mystery he was creating “continued, unbelievably enough, until May 1951″—when it was, presumably, resolved. But to find the resolution, we must resort to the Notes at the back of the book.

The book is not footnoted but it is thoroughly sourced in the Notes which refer to page numbers in the main text—one of several accepted scholarly practices these days. But sometimes Schumacher and Kitchen do more than simply source their facts: they retail whole anecdotes. In the case of Nancy O., they reveal in the Notes that Li’l Abner fell in love with this mysterious woman with an hourglass figure whose face is never shown. Capp ran a contest to determine what Nancy O. should look like, asking readers to send in photographs of “their sweetest girl.” The winner, a University of Florida student, was depicted in the strip on May 14 and then appeared on the Milton Berle tv show the following evening. In the strip, however, the reason that Abner fell in love with this shapely specimen is that she had the face of his mother; when Nancy O. had plastic surgery done to give her a more youthful, beautiful visage, Abner promptly fell out of love. A typical Capp stunt. But it is consigned to the small print in the back of the book, where only fanatics like me browse.

And buried in another Note is one of the most revealing insights in the book. After mentioning an unpublished autobiography Capp wrote, Kitchen says: “More than forty-five years after he worked for Fisher, Al Capp’s emotions still ran high when he discussed the details of his employment and Fisher’s character. He was becoming so enraged when typing the manuscript that he [hit the keys so hard they] would punch holes in the paper when he was typing lower-case o’s. Entire pages dealing with Fisher are perforated, whereas all the other pages are clean.”

In various places, Schumacher and Kitchen remind us that while Capp was cranky and argumentative and stingy (a typical child of the Depression), he was also generous, surreptitiously giving money to people and causes he thought especially needy or deserving. To the end—even while posing as a rip-snorting conservative—he was essentially liberal: he supported gay rights and “on more than one occasion, stopped someone from telling a gay ‘joke,’ or an anti-black joke.”

His last years were sad. Confined to a wheelchair (unable to walk because emphysema shortened his breath with the slightest exertion), he was sick and delusional, “wrote excoriating letters” to family and friends, fought with his assistants “when they tried to collect money he claimed they didn’t have coming”; he endured mood swings from rage to depression, caused, perhaps, by his being over-medicated. “He could be overheated one minute, tender the next. He still had powerful feelings for his family. … Capp spoke of wanting to provide for Catherine, ‘to keep her warm.’ … ‘She deserved a better life.’”

When he dies November 5, 1979—exactly two years after the last daily Li’l Abner strip was published (pictured here)—on page 261 of a 263-page text, we are relieved that this contrary man is at last at rest. 

The book is amply but not excessively illustrated with photographs and a dozen or so Li’l Abner strips. The authors mention and discuss most (if not all) of the fondly recalled of the strip’s lore—Sadie Hawkins Day, the shmoo, Lower Slobbovia, Fearless Fosdick, and the like. But, strangely, there is little or no analysis of the strip as pervasive satire.

The shmoos, for example, supply humans with food and loving companionship and are therefore a threat to so-called civilization:  humanity loses the motivation to go to war and to engage in every sort of capitalistic enterprise. Why bother? Shmoos provide everything one needs. And for that very reason, in Capp’s satirically warped mind, the shmoos had to be destroyed wholesale. Otherwise, they would “corrupt” society, demolishing the very things upon which civilization is founded—namely, greed and need.

And Lower Slobbovia, Capp’s satire about U.S. foreign aid, is similarly slighted; the authors mention this miserably poor “country” only in connection with the Lena the Hyena contest to draw the world’s ugliest woman.

At first blush, the absence of any discussion of Capp’s satirical genius seems a colossal oversight. Li’l Abner was the first overtly and doggedly satirical comic strip in syndication, breaking long-standing taboos in the industry by espousing and proclaiming a point-of-view on social and political matters usually left safely off camera, and Capp achieved fame outside the strip as a satirical commentator of raucous but keen social and political insight. His fame, built upon satire, was so great that he was the only cartoonist other than Walt Disney to have a theme park built upon his creation—Dogpatch, U.S.A.

Capp was one of a handful of genuine trail-blazing newspaper comic strip cartoonists, and he is in the forefront of that small but significant procession. Without any discussion of the workings of Capp’s satire, we can’t have much appreciation for the profound achievements of his career.

In defense of the authors, however, I direct attention to the subtitle of the book: it’s the “Life” not the “Life and Art” of Al Capp. The emphasis is, as predicated by the title, on the cartoonist’s life not on his artistry. And his life was, as his brother once said, at least as interesting—as compelling a narrative—as the fictions Capp told about himself.

Footnits: I NEVER MET CAPP, but I saw him in action once. He was the luncheon speaker at a conclave of college journalists in Chicago in 1958. The Vietnam war was still some years in the future, so Capp had not yet assumed the role of goad with collegiate audiences. As the luncheon crowd assembled, I was standing at the entrance to the ballroom when he and his entourage came down the hall. He didn’t so much limp because of his wooden left leg: he lurched, swaying from side to side as he swung his artificial limb along, transferring his weight from his good leg to his bad and back again in rhythmic alternation.

After lunch, he did three things that have stuck in my memory. He was seated at a raised head table with various dignitaries of the conference, and I was at a table nearby, so I could see him clearly. When he’d finished eating and just before he was introduced to speak, he dipped his fingers into the goblet of water in front of him and wiped them on his napkin. His drinking water glass was suddenly a finger bowl. Others may have found his maneuver somewhat crass, but I didn’t: I understood, I thought. As a cartoonist myself, I was fairly fastidious about keeping my hands clean because if I didn’t, I risked putting smudges on the drawing paper, blemishes that might be reproduced with the drawing. So I always washed my hands before doing any drawing. It became a habit, then a kind of fixation. And I recognized the same fixation in Capp.

His speech consisted of answering questions from the crowd. One exchange was memorable. A co-ed wearing a tight green sweater stood up, and, alluding to Evil Eye Fleagle in the strip, she asked Capp how to deliver the “double whammy.” He looked at her for only an instant before responding with a grin: “Just keep on wearing that sweater, honey.”

After the laughter subsided somewhat, he gave his quip a second bounce: “If this is what she’s like when she’s green,” he said, “think of what she’ll be like when she’s ripe.”

Ugly sexist comments, no question; but not so far askew for the time.

At the end of his remarks, Capp turned serious. He’d grown up in a succession of ghettos, he said, poor neighborhoods where the kids who played together made a diverse band of juveniles, coming from a variety of ethnicities. He’d sometimes eat at friends’ houses, and they at his. Sometimes the meal was spaghetti and meatballs; sometimes, gefilte fish and motzo ball soup; sometimes, chitlins witih red beans and rice; sometimes, corned beef and cabbage; sometimes, wiener schnitzel. The kids always enjoyed the variety. They were not upset by their differences but instead enjoyed them.

Then came Capp’s punchline: he’d spent his youth trying to escape that neighborhood, Capp said, and he was spending his adulthood trying to get back into it.

It was bullshit, of course; but you have to admire the sentiment in his metaphor.

Ever since, those three things about Capp’s performance at that luncheon defined him in my mind. And as I learned more about Capp, I came to believe that definition was pretty much on the mark.

Before we leave Capp, one more historic scrap. You may have noticed, as thousands have, that the part in Li’l Abner’s hair shifted around: first on the right; then on the left. Asked which side his hillbilly bumpkin parted his hair on, Capp usually said, “On the side facing the reader, naturally.” And so it was for over four decades. But before Capp fell into that groove, he experimented, briefly—only four or five times—with Abner having a part on only one side of his coifure. And herewith, we present the evidence.

The anthology’s cover and first story is by Kalah Allen, an artist I was introduced to back at SPX ’97 but whose work I have rarely seen since. She’s a contemplative artist who employs a soft, simple line in her depiction of a sweet quasi-relationship, the sort where a lot of emotion is experienced in tiny fragments of time over years. In terms of her character design and line, she reminds me a bit of Colleen Frakes. Jesse Reklaw contributes a typically funny story about his fantasy character Bluefuzz, designed to mimic the feel of a Dungeons & Dragons adventure gone horribly awry, but which still feels entirely authentic in the way it creates its fantasy milieu. He jams an insane 54 panels onto the page in a 6 x 9 grid.

MK Reed and Rich Tommaso use a 9-panel grid to cleverly and slowly reveal a grisly sight in a tree that countless pedestrians pass by every day. Reed’s use of banal dialogue is a sort of magician’s distraction technique that at the same time passes on cryptic clues. This is a very nice writer/artist pairing; there’s an ease in the way the pages are constructed that makes it feel as though they have been collaborating for a long time. Both Drew Weing and Matt Wiegle contribute fantasy comics about a mysterious underworld that leads the reader’s eye across the page in a very deliberate, rewarding manner. Both stories are really about things other than standard fantasy tropes (commerce in the former and a comedy of manners in the latter).

Copyright 2012 Rina Ayuyang

There’s an unpredictable range of material in this comic. There are diary zines like Rina Ayuyang’s endlessly entertaining accounts of motherhood, creepy gag pages like Julia Gfrorer’s “Tasseomancy” depicting hilarious tea leaf formations, and absurd gag strips like Jonathan Hill’s story about a library stool which comes to life and revolts against his station, only to be defeated. There are warm, personal anecdotes like Jason Martin’s comic about hanging out with friends and avoiding a potentially sticky situation, and then hilariously mean stories about a group of summer camp friends who ostracize one of their own for no apparent reason. Artists like Corrine Mucha work big in her story about trying to “help” ants as a child, while artists like Andy Hartzell simplify their line and try to cram as many panels as possible onto a page.

Copyright 2012 Jonathan Hill

Other notable stories include an excellent one-pager by Robin Enrico about wanting to mosh at a Soundgarden concert that makes great use of his clear design sense and willingness to have a lot of competing visual stimuli in each panel, creating that sense of disorientation one feels at a show. Tessa Brunton’s “In Theory” is yet another charming autobiographical story about how running wild through a graveyard is a better idea than a reality. Damien Jay and Minty Lewis’ “Tales From Leisure Cove” combines Lewis writing about her usual anthropomorphic dogs and Jay drawing them in his loose, sketchy style. It’s a typically cringe-inducing story about social mores (Lewis specializes in this), skewering a certain type of leisure-class person who gets his fur in a ruffle because someone doesn’t play along and laugh at his dumb jokes. Lewis is great at establishing a strange set of character dynamics and then grinding them into the reader’s face to the point of discomfort, maximizing laughs from squirmy and awkward situations. Finally, Lilli Carre’s back cover makes nice use of color, using whole panels with white lettering on dark red text as a way of breaking up the comic and leading up to the final gag.

Means tries to vary the reading experience by carefully alternating drawing styles (clear line vs ragged line, or cartoony vs naturalistic), artwork size, and subject matter (fantasy vs autobio). He creates a nice, intuitive flow; there aren’t any jolts despite the variability of the subject matter. The whole package is done in the same size as Papercutter and in general is designed to look attractive and approachable. There’s nothing here that I’d call cutting edge, but it is obvious that every artist submitted their best work.

Copyright 2012 Minty Lewis and Damien Jay

That’s why it was so refreshing to read Ellen Forney’s Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo, & Me. It’s less a story than it is a therapy journal comic, but Forney’s instincts as an entertainer kick in even on the dreariest of pages. It’s about her experience being treated for bipolar disorder (aka manic depression). Forney has plenty of alt-comics bona fides, from her delightful Tomato comic in the ’90s, her hilarious childhood memoir Monkey Food, the amusing short story collection I Love Led Zeppelin, to Lust, her collection of clever illustrations for The Stranger. She’s a comics lifer, even if much of her recent output has been as an illustrator. This is by far the longest story she’s ever done, and while the book wobbles at times, the sheer attractiveness of Forney’s line and her willingness to pour her heart out on the page gives it momentum.

What also sets the book apart from similar fare is Forney’s exploration of how mental illness’s possible connection to creativity. When diagnosed, she almost glibly notes that she’s joined the “Club Van Gogh” of bipolar artists and writers. And as the first couple of chapters of the book illustrate, cycling through the manic phase of her illness initially gives her a constant feeling of exhilaration. Every idea is brilliant. Every person met is a chance for a memorable sexual encounter or opportunity for a magical adventure. Everything is a million miles an hour, and she sweeps up everybody into her wake, while every choice she makes has the potential to start a personal, artistic or political revolution. Of course, the down side of mania is that it potentially leads to poor decision-making, narcissistic behavior, and a general inability to really focus.

Of course, in the moment, as Forney relates, it’s akin to being on long-lasting crystal meth. Only the crash that follows lasts for weeks or months, and it gets worse as one gets older. With the story told in retrospect, Forney does pile on her slightly younger self and plays up her more foolishly stubborn decisions regarding her lifestyle and health. For example, Forney opts to eschew medication at first, “working” during her up cycle on some crazy tangential projects. Forney spends a lot of time in the early goings of this book on her sillier exploits. I’m not sure if this is because she wanted to balance the darker portions of the book with lighter fare, or if she found anecdotes like doing a pornographic photo reference shoot (for Eros Comics, natch) where she and two friends pretended to be a “grrl band” in a dressing room amusing in their own right. As a reader, it felt like a little of both; Forney may not quite be an exhibitionist, but she’s certainly an oversharer. She’s someone who’s always had crazy stories to tell even while growing up, and to a degree her own life was influenced by those experiences, such that she went out of her way to do crazy things both for the moment itself but more importantly for a chance to tell someone about them later.

That urge is what makes Forney such a charming storyteller. The problem that she faces in the book is that while she recognizes that she was unbalanced, she views that as the source of her creativity. Some of the anecdotal research she does indicates that some artists indeed linked their agony to their creativity, like Edvard Munch. Like many, she also worries that medication would change her personality, a stance she clings to until she enters the worst depressive phase of her life. Then, and only then, is she ready to listen to her psychiatrist regarding medication, a tenuous process that takes years to properly figure out. It is also one that she subtly sabotages, as she withholds from her therapist her continued pot smoking and refuses to consider doing things like yoga. Again, she stacks the deck narratively against her younger self, but it eventually becomes clear why she must do so.

Forney switches back and forth between a simplistic, almost stick-figure style; her familiar smooth and cartoony style; and the occasional highly naturalistic drawing designed to jolt the reader. If the first third of the book is a roller coaster going straight up, then the next third is that same ride plunging downward for an impossibly long time. Here, Forney shares her actual journal sketches from that time, drawn as she attempted to capture the precise feelings of depression, anxiety, and despair. She opens the fourth chapter in a minimalist style as she uses fourteen borderless panels to document her journey from her bed to her couch. During her deepest depression, this is about as far as she could make it some days. This is a journey that actually moves both her mother and therapist to congratulate her, a compliment that tastes bitter in Forney’s mouth. Forney’s sketchbook drawings are remarkable, capturing the ugly, distorted feeling of depression with an almost visceral level of rendering.

Most of the rest of the book can be described as Forney desperately trying to get off that rollercoaster and lay down her own, more level track. There’s a sense of her desperately trying to make connections, even as she isolates herself as a result of the depression (a very common phenomenon). Even if she feels unworthy of the attention of her friends and loved ones, she still seeks “company” in writings about depression. The simple act of finding a way to feel less alone is the foundation for her recovery. Her sessions with her therapist are for a while her only moments of relief, offering a space to ward off the immobilizing grip of depression. Certain techniques more commonly used for other disorders (like a bunch of tricks from cognitive behavioral therapy) are also part of the story.

However, the balance of the book concerns the tricky, uncertain, and ever-evolving relationship Forney has with her medication. Toward the end, there’s a stunning section where she goes into detail regarding each of the medications she takes, their positive effects, and their side effects. Lithium, the oldest of all medications for bipolar disorder, can cause severe rashes and memory loss. Other medications affect her blood counts. For every individual, finding the right combinations seems less like a science than an art. The fact that Forney continued to smoke pot and keep it from her therapist may or may not have contributed to issues like memory loss, but the reason why she concealed it ties into something she doesn’t specifically discuss in the book, but which is there throughout: a fear of judgment and criticism.

Forney worries about people finding out that she’s “crazy,” until she owns her illness and gets support. She relates a number of incidents where people rightly call her out for being self-absorbed. She reluctantly tells her therapist about a weekend where she manically did cocaine, fearing embarrassment and judgment. Her therapist sagely replies, “I’m your doctor, not your parent.” When Forney finally confesses that she is a pothead, she does so after realizing that whatever reasons she had for smoking pot (and there were many, even if some of them were a rebellion at sharing every inch of herself with her therapist), it’s in some ways the last bit of track she needs to lay for recovery. All along, she finds ways to reconnect with people, finding understanding friends who know there are times that Forney isn’t really capable of going out and doing something but instead needs someone to quietly be with her.

When Forney finally manages to level out, she’s able to continue to use her formidable work ethic to return to that question of the relationship between mental illness and creativity. Her conclusion is that while creative people tend to be more susceptible to mental illness, the illness itself is not the cause of the creativity. Indeed, Van Gogh’s paintings came during lucid periods, not during the depths of his depression. As Forney discovers during her own journey, it’s an act of sheer will just to get out of bed, much less create a masterpiece. Certainly, leveling out allowed her to draw this 240-page comic, as well as to illustrate Sherman Alexie novels and release a couple of collections through Fantagraphics. She’s a far more prolific and productive cartoonist now than when she was untreated. Forney notes, “I’d say my creative thought process is there whether I’m manic or stable … maybe I have to believe this but … stability is good for my creativity.”

Having to believe this is a fact colors her actions and beliefs in retrospect. Yoga is now an important part of her life, so she depicts her initial opposition to it as foolish. Smoking pot ultimately proved to be harmful, so she depicts herself as stubborn and foolish in hiding it from her therapist. Glamorizing her mania and ignoring the effects it had on others is depicted as self-absorbed and selfish. The present rewrites the past, even if Forney honestly tries to confront some of these issues and talks about how she sometimes misses her manic states–just not at the cost it eventually incurred. Indeed, when she started therapy, she was no longer able to enjoy the manic states and was starting to have trouble differentiating between a “real” good mood and being elevated by illness. This kind of revisionist storytelling is only natural when one reaches a particular stopping point in telling one’s own stories. The conclusions she came to may well have been completely different if she started writing the book immediately after finding a balance, if she wrote it during therapy, or if she decided to write the book ten years from now.

She concludes the book by saying “I’m okay!” as she draws a piece that literally addresses the issues I bring up here: talking to her younger self just after she was diagnosed, assuring her that everything will be OK. That last, assuring page is well-earned and far from glib, because the one thing Forney gets across in this book is that therapy is incredibly hard, transformative work. It’s harrowing and forces one to reevaluate every aspect of one’s life because old paradigms are crumbling. Forney went through that gauntlet and earned a hard-won stability that has allowed her to transfer the sheer effort needed to make it through therapy into her life and art. Marbles is not only a testament to that journey, but it’s Forney’s own way of providing “company” for others.

The first story follows two simply rendered, nameless characters on a tour of land that was first devastated and later reinvigorated by a massive, still raging fire. One character starts the story in a lush forest, and takes the other through a landscape that is increasingly bizarre and alien; they run through hills made of ash until the see the fire itself. In it, they see that life has mutated in a short time to an alarming degree, as a flaming deer assures them that it’s fine, “going strong.” It then runs away on a page where its running form slowly unravels to become part of the fire and then just a series of red and yellow squiggles. It’s a page that reminds me a little of Michael DeForge in terms of effect but not rendering. On a later credits page, Kessler notes that he copied the painters John and Paul Nash for a starter image, and the desolate, post-war forest landscape of Paul Nash’s We Are Making A New World seems to be that particular starting point.

In the second story, “Kawanishi’s Garden”, the artist Kawanishi Hide and his bright but subdued color sense provide the inspiration for a series of interweaving stories about a woman who rules over a city with dense, almost wild vegetation and listens to one of her traveling counselors go on about a death dream. When she challenges him on this, he calmly and unexpectedly starts to talk about his role as the literal and accidental creator of the universe, as a result of an accidental trip through time to the moment of creation. As his story becomes increasingly bizarre and unlikely (though told with utter conviction), the images of the story become more abstract, breaking down into color squiggles much as the first story does. It’s a cross between a bit of fascinating philosophical musing and a shaggy dog story, which describes much of what Kessler does.

The third story is a bridge, as it’s a collaboration between Kessler and someone named Reuben Mwaura. This is a grim, stripped-down story about Mwaura’s abusive childhood, with very minimal figure drawing and a monochrome wash on each page. That’s until the end of the story, when the abusive lover of Mwaura’s mother tries to barge his way in and then sets fire to the house with Mwaura and his younger brother still in it. A deep purple represents the terror of night until a florescent yellow arrives to signal that the house was aflame. They survive, but the end of the story is a mix of relief and terror at the new level of poverty they have sunk to. Kessler makes great use of a simple but harrowing memoir to create a number of memorable images.

The fourth story is an all-pictorial experiment set during wartime, as the language barrier is represented by characters speaking in pictograms. Though interesting-looking, the pictograms are distracting and make reading the story a slog; the effect is that of a not-quite-successful gimmick. On the other hand, the last story, which involves a jilted man being told by his lover that he didn’t love him (“What a moronic question … I suppose the answer’s no.”) The reaction of the jilted man is hilariously over-the-top, as big tears run down his face to the point that snot starts running out of his nose. The jilted lover goes through a strange experience as he accidentally runs into a bull with his car and tries to create meaning by connecting events, an attempt that is immediately shot down by his ex. It’s a funny variation on the old philosophical argument of “everything is connected” vs “everything is random,” one that has no resolution in this story.

Kessler runs the gamut of genres, philosophical ideas, and storytelling styles, filtering them through a color sense that dominates the comic more than any other element. A sharply rendered figure often yields to a color pattern field that in turn becomes an abstraction, all in the service of telling a story. This was one of the best comics I read in 2012 by an artist who uses the means of reproduction as a powerful storytelling tool as he shifts from concrete to abstract and back again. Considering that creation and destruction (especially the purifying and terrifying destructive force of fire) seem to be his main focus as writer, alternating between the two extremes through the conductive element of color and color patterns is an ideal storytelling solution.

And so it is with Abelard, the latest graphic novel from artist Renaud Dillies, who had previously graced American readers with Bubbles & Gondola, a book about a cute mouse, unread by me. He both wrote and drew that book, but here he joins forces with fellow cartoonist Régis Hautière, who is credited with the story.

Dillies returns to the funny animal milieu in Abelard. The title character is a little chick given to wearing an oversize hat that frequently dispenses banal, fortune cookie-esque sayings (an example: “Write your troubles in the sand, carve your blessings in stone”). Why does his hat do this? Because it’s magical, duh.

Seemingly bereft of parents and living in a bucolic, mostly female-free marsh, Abelard is astoundingly naïve. Seriously, no one over the age of ten is as clueless as this kid appears to be. How clueless is he? So clueless that, when he falls hopelessly in love with a young woman visiting the marsh, he decides to travel to America so he can hop in one of those new fangled flying machines (the story seems to be set in the early 20^th century) and give her the moon. He does this after a passer-by suggests offering the girl the moon is the best way to win her love and Abledard is obviously a very literal-minded person (we’ve already been treated to a winsome sequence of him attempting to reach the moon via ladder).

But of course, being a naïve innocent set adrift in the cold, heartless world is an easy, familiar motif for cartoonists and authors to rely upon. And, as you might expect we get lots of sequences of Abelard being flummoxed or abused by mean, cruel people. Abelard even joins up with a cynical, dour bear, and if you suspect that the bear finds his hard heart melted and learns to trust in people and the world again through his interactions with Abelard, then I will commend you for having read more than one book in your life.

I confess I’ve never understood why Western culture trumpets these “wise fool” characters to the extent that it does. I’ve always regarded naïveté as something to be overcome rather than cherished. In life I’ve found naïve people to generally the most bigoted, ignorant and unlikeable people around. Maybe I’m going to the wrong bars though.

Is all of Abelard bad? No. Dillies is certainly a skilled artist. I like his rough, sketchy, cartoonish line. I like the way he uses thick, black brush strokes to outline his characters. I like the map that he draws to outline Abelard’s travels with gypsies and the way he designs a page so that the panel borders look a gypsy caravan. Those little bits are genuinely charming.

But those elements aren’t enough to save Abelard from the slough of bathos and sentimentality it’s mired in. Technical skill alone can’t save a comic like this when what it’s in service to is so thoroughly uninspired. You can pull all the rabbits out of your hat you like, but if they all look something like Abelard, I’m not calling it magical.

By contrast, we’re not seeing a whole lot in Prison Pit Book Four that we haven’t seen already — we’re just seeing more of it. Prison Pit has always been gross, but this volume, in which the unstoppable protagonist Cannibal Fuckface attempt to break free of the subterranean psychemechanical prison ship he was stranded in last time around, was the first that made even a seasoned hand at the rough stuff like me emit weary moans of repulsion and disgust with seemingly each new pustule-encrusted beast that appeared. Do I really need to see a mindless ogre made from genital warts and capable only of saying the word “FUGG” crush people’s heads like overripe tomatoes? Do I really need to see a testicle-headed thug called Undigestible Scrotum pull a morning star from his/her vagina while his/her spike-studded testicles dangle obscenely? Do I really need to see a small detachable anus extend a poisoned spike that causes its victims to shit out white, brain-like egg-feces out of which skull-faced hellhounds emerge? In particular, do I really need to see Cannibal Fuckface hijack his prison ship by chopping a hole in its navigational computer and fucking the vaginal orifice he uncovers with his barbed erection?

The answer to all of those questions, of course, is god no. Which I think is the point, at this point. Point to any individual sequence in PPB4 and you’ll see exhilarating action cartooning, deliriously inventive creature designs, and funny black humor. (My favorite, which I won’t spoil, involves the resolution of CF’s battle with Undigestable Scrotum, a chainsaw on a stick, and extremely disproportionate revenge.) But the overall impression is not exhilarating but exhausting. Cannibal Fuckface inhabits a world with only one setting: HARD. Any joy, any beauty, any kindness he or we encounter is accidental or ironic. To spend a prolonged period of time in Prison Pit is to open your mental orifice to Ryan’s razor-studded art-cock. By the time the book’s “explosive conclusion” rolled around, I thought to myself, “God, just die already, asshole.” That’s something one of these characters might say, now that I think about it. Establishing that kind of psychic link between the book’s awful world and our own is dark magic indeed.

What makes Henderson so great is the way he deliberately creates a tension between a rock-solid and predictable plot structure and the stupidity of his premise. One of his greatest creations is “Lonely Robot Duckling”, and the story in this issue finds that character plaintively asking an office worker, “What … is … an … pornography?” After several panels of the worker trying to correct the duckling’s grammar, the duckling gets the man to yell, “I want some pornography!” loud enough for a fellow worker to hear. That pattern gets repeated when the duckling asks to be shown pornography, leading to this great sentence: “This … is … what … you … earth … people … jerk … off … to? It … is … weak …” (Henderson using an all-caps, typewritten font instead of his own lettering for the duckling is just part of why it’s so funny.) That of course leads to the worker showing the duckling all manner of perversions, the duckling disappearing again and the worker getting fired. Henderson lays the narrative pipe in such a way that he knows that the reader knows what’s coming and still makes it funny.

Henderson is well aware that the reader is aware of how meta this all is, with a cartoon involving a wolf and a flamingo and a dozen narrative captions explaining every aspect of the drawing and the joke and a final caption that reads, “You’re right. It does kind of ruin the joke (such as it is) when I over-explain everything.” My favorite strips may have been “Monroe Simmons Looks Back”, which are a sort of quasi-autobiographical series of vignettes about weird things he saw in Woodstock, NY as he was growing up: sadistic P.E. teachers, hippies shouting down kids’ plays about the government, teachers of uncertain sexuality, and dubious ways of getting across a stream. The issue is just jammed with dozens of more gags all heightened by his perfect, simplistic, bold line.

In the pages of Beta Testing the Apocalypse, every moment of human existence lives on in the present, disregarded and forgotten and collapsed beyond recognition, but always immanent and ready to recur, just like the cataclysms that lurk in so many of these stories. In yoking the end of days and the dawn of time, a suburban lawn and primordial jungle, our planet of slums and ancient human sacrifice, Kaczynski portrays a western culture suspended—taut, immobile, only seemingly calm—between past and future, progress and decay, peak oil and the green economy. The watchwords of his art, as one character clues us in, are at once “archaic heritage” and “the limitless possibilities of the future”; its avatars are a cro-magnon in headphones, a cave-painting handprint pressed onto a corporate logo.

After years of cartooning, Beta Testing the Apocalypse is Kaczynski’s first full book, for the most part collecting the strips he had contributed to the anthology MOME. In them, a man drives to work, and gets in a traffic jam. The construction of a condo tower adversely affects the psychic health of a young couple. An urban professional joins an enclave of idealist “brand experts” at a far-flung compound. An actor dissolves too completely into his role as a neolithic sound artist. Conventionally, these brief accounts of modern life are “stories,” but that almost seems a misnomer: just as often as these comics narrate events, they also ruminate on science-fiction landscapes of freeways, condominiums, and business parks. As often as two characters engage in simple conversation, so too do they intone the cant of bobo real estate agents or corporate hippiedom. “Each condo unit a unique marketing habitus. 976 sq ft of MySpace,” drones one character; or, “Reverse the genetic credit crunch”; “Compound the interest of biodiversity.”

At times, Kaczynski’s juxtapositions do come off as too pat—the jargon of commerce and ecology butt up against each other a bit too archly, while that prehistoric man wears his headphones a bit too pointedly. One might also object that the cartoonist’s preoccupations register more often as belonging to his influences than to his own investigations. To his credit, Kaczynski acknowledges as much, duly footnoting his book’s debt to J.G. Ballard’s drowned worlds and concrete islands in an index that records other oblique references to Jane Jacobs and Slavoj Žižek—though entries for “Gibson, William,” or “DeLillo, Don” remain curiously absent. Kaczynski’s looming dread and sub/urban automata owe at least as much to White Noise as his vision of mechanized, entropic modernity does to The Atrocity Exhibition, not to mention his pontifications on gleaming consumerism: “Consider the modern bathroom. … How did this antiseptic room where excrement magically disappears come to be?” In such revelations of the science-fictional in the everyday—Kaczynski also invokes grain silos and utilitarian office buildings as totems of some alien race—the cartoonist conducts a kind of archaeology of the future from among our commonplace existence, in much the same way the Godard of Alphaville or the Tarkovsky of Stalker called forth the otherworldly moonscapes that have always been dormant in what our culture has erected or let fall into ruin.

But one of the pleasures of reading Beta Testing, as in other watershed collections like Caricature, Curses, or Everything Together, lies in watching a cartoonist become less mindful of his precursors, less rote in his treatment of subject matter, both freer and more assured. As the book progresses, Kaczynski sloughs off influence, just as his characters slip away from civilization. A breakthrough story like 2008’s “Million Year Boom” nearly brings the book to a halt halfway through with its impressive and authentic weirdness, yet still retains the stamp of millenarian systems novelists, still partakes of the old dead-eyed Clowesian aloofness. By the time we reach the concluding story, “The New”—at once an ode to modernist architecture and an allegory literalizing the decline of the west, created uniquely for this volume—Kaczynski’s layouts have exploded into space, cities and buildings splayed out on the page in startling and diagrammatic splashes. He introduces to his work an almost invisible use of ink, a constant tension between abstraction and representation, an uneasy balance between arcana and official history. Such unsettling surprises far outweigh “The New”’s concessions to generic convention, in an inventively cartooned but incongruous diversion into action comics and terrorist kidnapping. Even this dissonance is striking, though: further evidence that Kaczynski’s juggling of ideas has never been more adept, his thematic collisions more idiosyncratic, more his own.

In the final movements of the book, the extremes that Kaczynski superimposes onto one another—the west and the developing world, shantytowns and corporate towers—speak to an almost alchemical impulse, but in reverse: a will to find the dross among the silver of modernity; a yearning for transmutation, or “Phase Transition” as one story’s title has it. “Human shit turns into deposits of gold,” says one character of the way his city capitalizes on human suffering. Kaczynski’s stories try and envision some way to invert that free-market alchemy: they wish to smear the pristine surfaces of global capitalism with shit or piss or blood, some primitive and uncivilized part of our lives, to see what might result. The desire evinced, in this book, is not to build more towers, to scale more heights, but instead to delve into the bowels of the earth, and to find a new, more honest future in all we’ve shoveled under.

TwoMorrows enters this arena too. In character, their books tend to be the last outpost of the old comic-book fan syndrome. The long-running Jack Kirby Collector is a defining project. Their latest isolated offering, a hardcover celebration of comic book artist Matt Baker, follows the expected pattern. Baker was the master of a stylistic phase of comic books in the late 1940s, wedged in between the superhero and the horror comics, known to the fans and collectors as “good girl art,” which is to say comics that constituted a kind of narrative version of a pin-up. That’s likely to put it more in the realm of kitsch than art, like a lower-brow version of girlie calendars. I’m sure it is to be explained sociologically as a form of reading that fed the tastes of a generation of young returning servicemen who were reading comic books when they were sent away and who weren’t sure what they were supposed to be reading when they were sent back except that they were now interested in sex. Why comic book fans might be fond of it sixty years later would take too long to figure out. The best one can say is that the period look gives it more of a charm than its more recent equivalent, but then that would be admitting that it looks dated. A problem with the book at hand is that it leans too heavily toward reprinting that limited phase of Baker’s work. We get two full reprints of Phantom Lady stories, a couple of Canteen Kates, a Sky Gal and a Tiger Girl. Thus the full-story reprints, a full 32-page color section at the start of the book and a another likewise at the end,  are all taken from the short period 1946-1949.

An interesting aspect of this phase worth mentioning is that Baker worked for Jerry Iger’s shop. Iger had been in partnership with Will Eisner until they split in 1940.  In the excellent and lengthy text of the book there are anecdotes and insights into the later workings of Iger’s studio, which I would say is a matter of some historical interest. The ‘sweatshop’ period of comic book production demands a book–length study of its own. Making comics under factory conditions isn’t a very attractive notion from our vantage point, but everybody involved seems to have come away with funny stories and memories of camaraderie. In Baker’s case, his closest confreres were Al Feldstein and Jack Kamen, who each went on to make their mark at EC Comics.

The more interesting, I would say mature, phase of Baker’s work falls between 1949 and 1955, during which time he specialized as a freelancer in romance for St. John’s line of comics. A dozen stories from this phase were reprinted in John Benson’s book Romance Without Tears, published by Fantagraphics, and I would dearly like to see some more. The artist drew a number of covers that are quite startling in their originality. The stories, the writer of which Benson identifies as Dana Dutch, are the peak of Baker’s work in comics. It was in this period also that he drew the lately celebrated Rhymes With Lust of 1950, recognized now as a very early graphic novel. All of this gets covered in the 200-page book in spite of my caveat above, with plenty of interesting reproductions, many from original artwork. A final phase, in which Baker had a hard time getting any work at all, is also examined briefly. Between 1955 and ‘59 he mostly pencilled for Vince Colletta, who was somehow well enough placed to pick up as much work as he could handle from Atlas and Charlton. He farmed a great deal of it out to others to pencil, leaving the inking for himself, which is one way to make a living and I’ve never had any problem with it. Colletta is a figure that comic book fans love to vilify. There’s him, Fredric Wertham, and the Red Skull, making the triumvirate of evil.

The essence of such a project as this, that which we really want to know, is the biographical material. Baker was an African American making a living in comics, who for his talents was well respected apparently by just about everyone who encountered him. He was an exceedingly handsome, well-dressed dude, and there is some speculation here, which caught me by surprise, that he may have been gay (the speculation is from a friend and fellow artist who was gay). The editors have interviewed as many people as they could get hold of, with selected excerpts from older interviews used to fill out the picture. The artist himself was never interviewed before his tragic early death at the age of 38 in 1959. He had a bad heart, and some of the people who were close to him discuss that.

A round-up of attractions: firstly the number of photos reproduced, approximately 28 of them, of Baker, his family, and his circle; secondly, a rarity worth mentioning is the newspaper strip, Flamingo, about a Gypsy woman, of which we are shown nine dailies and a Sunday; thirdly, and obligatory for a Twomorrows book I suppose, is the exhaustive checklist of all Baker’s known work, compiled with the help experts such as Jim Vadeboncoeur. That just leaves it to be said that, for a hardcover, I wish this thing were better bound; for a monument to a guy fifty-four years dead, it could have been sturdier.

San Francisco, which had become a hotbed of punk activity, also happened to be home to a handful of anarchist study groups, and some members of the latter were underground-comic artists who saw their work garnering less rack space with the demise of (or legal crackdown on) head-shop culture. The convergence of all these phenomena inspired Bay Area cartoonist Jay Kinney—who had become increasingly interested in anarchist ideas while doing work for the lefty paper In These Times, and had collaborated with a pre-Zippy Bill Griffith on the underground comic Young Lust—to pitch the idea of an anarchist comic to Last Gasp, the most political of the local alternative publishers. Last Gasp said yes, Kinney’s sometime collaborator and fellow anarchist Paul Mavrides signed on as co-editor, and Anarchy Comics was the result.

In its nine years of existence (1978–1987) only four issues of Anarchy appeared, but it would be hard to overestimate the comic’s political and cultural importance even thirty years later. Kinney and Mavrides’s creation brought together an irreverent-bordering-on-nihilistic punk sensibility, serious (but never dry or pedantic) lessons in anarchist history, freshly illustrated texts by such infamous revolutionaries as Emma Goldman and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, and that favorite anarchist sport, satirical potshots at mainstream leftists.

Anarchists have always prided themselves on their internationalism—not surprising, since being anti-government is about the only thing all anarchists agree on—and Kinney took that attitude to heart, assembling a far-flung coterie of artists for his comic and emblazoning the catchphrase “International Anarchy!” (or “International Comix!”) on the front cover of every issue for good measure. In its lifetime Anarchy Comics featured contributors from the Netherlands, Germany, England, France, and the US, including Clifford Harper, Spain Rodriguez, the team of Yves Frémion and François Dupuy (aka “Épistolier and Volny”), Gary Panter, Ruby Ray, Gilbert Shelton, Donald Rooum, Melinda Gebbie, and more than twenty others. The majority of the work appearing in the comic was original, but Kinney also commissioned translations of several pieces not previously published in English—most notably the series “Liberty Through the Ages” by Épistolier and Volny.

Anarchy Comics was a nearly perfect blend of “capital-a” anarchism—that is, overtly political critiques of capitalism, patriarchy, and consumerism—and “small-a” anarchism—a generally anti-authority or anti-“normality” stance, not explicitly political. Its aesthetic was informed in about equal measures by punk, the Situationists (the influential ultra-left group at the center of the May ’68 rebellion in France), the underground-comic classics, and longstanding anarchist tradition. The Situationists’ mark could be seen in Kinney and Navrides’s use of détournement, the practice of re-purposing images from straight comics and advertisements by replacing the original captions with new, subversive ones. Punk showed up in the comic’s swipes at hippies and the middle-American nuclear family, and in its (at the time) novel and often bizarre graphic look.

All of the above came together in the Kinney and Mavrides’s opus “Kultur Dokuments,” in Anarchy Comics #2. The strip, drawn mostly in a cold, geometric, pictogram style, follows the Picto family as they morph from unremarkable residents of Dullsville, to members of a leftist cult handing out leaflets at the local asbestos factory, to a post-political group singing “Little Red Caboose” while toasting marshmallows on a burning Dullsville police car. Along the way they’ve altered their own graphic style (after being encouraged to “Drop your picto character-armor and go for the gusto!”) and, together with an assortment of cartoon pranksters, they’ve “hung the last bureaucrat with the guts of the last priest”—quoting a May ’68 slogan. Nested inside “Kultur Dokuments” is another entire comic, the brilliant and graphically meticulous Archie parody “Anarchie,” which the Pictos’ son reads to pass the time while locked in his room. Anarchie, resplendent in a punk hairdo and circle-A t-shirt, is thrown out of his house when he tells his hippie father, “You don’t even know you’re dead—you just keep walking around!” In response, Mr. Andrews shouts, “Meaningful dialogue in this relationship is impossible,” and, while booting Anarchie to the sidewalk, “Don’t come back till you mellow out!” Anarchie and his friends Moronica, Blondie, and Ludehead, en route to Mr. Lodge’s mansion (“Daddykins is throwing a posh ball tonight to celebrate his corporation foreclosing on some little country!”) get hassled by a bunch of passing hippies—drawn as the Furry Freak Brothers!—listening to “Uncle John’s Band” on the car stereo. The Deadheads hurl a can of beer at Anarchie’s head while chuckling “Hey punk! You look thirsty! Peace! Love! Ha Ha!” So much for “Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair.”

Among the more explicitly anarchist pieces appearing in Anarchy Comics were illustrated historical strips about Durruti and the anarchist presence in the Spanish Civil War (written and drawn by Spain), the Yippies’ disruption of business at the New York Stock Exchange in 1968 (Épistolier and Volny), and the Paris Commune of 1871 (Spain again). Épistolier and Volny also presented the story of the Kronstadt massacre, wherein the Bolsheviks, consolidating their power in the just-established Soviet Union (meet the new boss—same as the old boss), slaughtered a group of anarchists who stubbornly clung to the original libertarian ideals of the Russian Revolution. (Anarchists’ longstanding animosity toward party-line Marxist-Leninists can in large part be traced to this disaster.)

Other features that were meant to either educate anarchists on their proud history or counter common myths about what anarchism really is included Mavrides’s “Some Straight Talk About Anarchy,” Gebbie’s “Quotes from Red Emma [Goldman],” and Harper’s presentation of Proudhon’s “What Is Government?” Goldman’s illustrated quotes reveal a figure whose views on feminism and women’s rights were just as radical seventy years later: Woman’s “freedom, her independence, must come from and through herself…by asserting herself as a personality and not a sex commodity…by refusing the right to anyone over body…by refusing to bear children unless she wants them; by refusing to be a servant to GOD, the STATE, SOCIETY, the husband, the family, etc.” In “What Is Government,” an early document laying out the anarchist argument against centralized authority, Proudhon writes “Government is slavery. Its laws are cobwebs for the rich and chains of steel for the poor. To be governed is to be watched, inspected, spied on, regulated, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, ruled…”

In “Some Straight Talk About Anarchy,” Mavrides blasts the 1984/Brave New World hybrid that the US had become by pointing out that life in the late twentieth century meant a choice between “Apocalyptic Babylon or Planetary Disneyland.” He mocks the non-progress made by labor in the previous forty years (“these days the right to peaceably assemble means quiet factories”) and espouses the self-evident but controversial view that people have the intelligence to organize themselves (“Your mind doesn’t need a government, does it?”). In a cartoon that appears on the inside cover of issue #1, widely reproduced ever since, Gerhard Seyfried juxtaposes the “popular misconception of a typical anarchist”—a sneering, black-robed terrorist holding a lit match to a bowling-ball-sized bomb—with “actual anarchists in real life”—a wholesome, garden-variety family of four. His point is a crucial one: Anarchists view anarchy as the natural, primordial state of things, and stress that most of our regular dealings with other people are anarchistic, in that we negotiate, cooperate, and help one another out of basic human kindness, free of outside coercion.

Less explicitly political, but more anarchic in the “chaos” sense is Gary Panter’s tongue-in-cheek and very punk “Awake, Purox, Awake,” a crudely drawn and pasted-up strip depicting two low-lifes who want to blow things up more or less for kicks. One of them asks, “What should we demolish today?” and then, after breakfast the next morning, declares, “Sunny day, full belly, makes me want to blow something up.” Exhibiting anarchists’ willingness to mock everything, even their own politics, is Mavrides and Kinney’s “No Exit,” in which they tweak both anarchists and ostensibly anarchist punk-rockers. The strip has a socially concerned but nihilistic singer (“Kill the Queen and kill the Pope / Kill the hippies who smoke dope”) traveling into the future to a time when the Revolution has finally won, and finding himself unable to deal with it. “Perhaps you’ll like the free autonomous bakers’ collective?” his hosts ask. “Here! Enjoy some 9-grain bread baked by unexploited labor!!” The punk takes one bite and spits it out: “Gak! Bleah!” He responds with equal horror to a blissed-out citizen who says, “I’m getting a telepathic message from the dolphins up on their L5 space colony,” drop-kicking her into a pool of sludge.

Other digs at the left’s party faithful include the illustration adorning the back cover of issue #1, “Exclusive on-the-spot sketch of mass anarchist demonstration in Tienanmen Square in Peking,” featuring hundreds of Chinese citizens in Mao suits brandishing little round bombs beneath a big “ANARCHY” sign. (Note: This was a decade before the famous Tienanmen Square protest of 1989.) The back cover of the following issue topped that, with a blasphemous Mavrides image (a poster actually available for purchase at the time) of Chairman Mao with huge Walter Keane eyes, and a wise-ass description sure to give any devoted Maoist a coronary: “Painted in oil and black velvet, this splendid example of true Proletarian Art combines stirring aesthetic skill with a sympathetic rendering of the late Chairman Mao’s wise, yet poignant face. Surely all revolutionaries who are concerned that Art should ‘serve the people’ will draw inspiration from this wonderful masterpiece and work hard to emulate its militance in every cultural area.”

Those two images, along with the rest of Anarchy’s front and back covers, are reproduced in their original form in a full-color section at the back of the assembled Anarchy Comics. It’s also interesting to note that the inside cover of each issue contains contact information (now obsolete, obviously) for a variety of anarchist groups and publications around the world. This marked what was probably the beginning of a movement that reached full flower a few years later, with anarchist groups sprouting up everywhere, anarchist zines being exchanged via international mail, and bigger and bigger contact lists of anarchist groups being circulated throughout the scene. (Some of the Bay Area people involved in Anarchy Comics also produced the massive International Blacklist of anti-authoritarian groups that appeared in the early ‘80s.)

Anarchy Comics represents the beginning of an important historical moment, when the philosophy and culture of anarchism were resuscitated after decades of widespread uninterest. It’s of its time, arguably, but with few exceptions it doesn’t seem at all dated today. It’s still as funny, irreverent, and illuminating as its editors intended. And it contains work from some of the best underground-comic artists of the late twentieth century, given free rein to snipe at authority to their heart’s content.

Russ Kick has collected graphic adaptations of 56 classics of world literature, beginning with Gilgamesh and ending with Dangerous Liaisons. Most appear as excerpts, though a few, disappointingly, are merely summarized or simply mentioned in the course of a short bio of the author. So if you want world literature, you should find an anthology of literature; it is really the art that makes this book worth having. With artists as prominent and diverse as Rick Geary (The Book of Revelation), Roberta Gregory (Popol Vuh), Will Eisner (Don Quixote), Peter Kuper (“A Modest Proposal”), and Robert Crumb (Boswell’s London Journal), the styles cover a spectrum from simple iconography, to grotesque caricature, to hyper-realism, to broad impressionistic washes of color.

The result is a long collection, dense with both text and imagery. It takes time to read this book, but it is a book worth taking time over. Reading one, or sometimes two, chapters in an evening, I enjoyed the careful pace of the work, as I let my eyes take in the page, slowly absorbing the meaning of the art, and then the words, and then, as often as not, considering the art again.

Of course some pieces succeed better than others. Alessandro Bonaccorsi’s single ghostly image for Sappho’s Fragments feels cold and alien — entirely wrong for the poems it appears alongside. But Ellen Linder’s modern-yet-medieval style is exactly right for The Letters of Heloise and Abelard. Many of the excerpts are so abridged that they seem to start and end somewhat arbitrarily, whereas the first entry — the Epic of Gilgamesh — wanders pointlessly for sixteen pages.

Those that work best capture the entirety of an episode, if not the entirety of a piece. Robert Berry and Josh Levitas’ adaptation of Shakespeare’s eighteenth sonnet is among the best of the lot. They succeed, not only in doing justice to the original poem, but also, with the illustrations, in adding a kind of meditative short story reflective of the emotion the sonnet conveys. Among the very worst is Ian Ball’s excerpt from Candide, the illustration for which is both ugly and irrelevant. The greatest disappointments, however, are those illustrations which, while beautiful, only barely remind us of the story, adding nothing of substance to our understating of it and giving no taste of the style of the original author. Molly Crabapple’s beautiful and clever illustrations to Dangerous Liaisons fall into this trap, while Cortney Skinner’s stiff but stunning painting for Ben Franklin’s “Advice to a Young Man on the Choice of a Mistress” is only saved by the editor’s decision to include the entirety of the text in his introduction.

However — the question that hangs over a collection like this is always, necessarily, one of selection. What gets included, and why? Declaring in the title that the collection is the canon only adds to the difficulty. Canonization, if we consider the historical origin of the term, is not only incidentally but primarily a process of exclusion. The question of what gets included and why can turn on accidents of taste and access, but the question of what gets excluded and whom is almost inherently political.

Kick has included some examples of literature from Chinese, Japanese, Mayan, Indian, Tibetan, Middle Eastern, and pre-Columbian American cultures (though nothing from Sub-Saharan Africa — oops). On the whole these are good pieces, and I’m glad to see them adapted. But I don’t think the effort at inclusion really succeeds, and it may even prove self-defeating. Were this a collection of “Western” (meaning European and North American) literature, the exclusion of work from China or India would be explicable and even correct. But if it is an anthology of world literature, the inclusion of this or that representative piece is not enough. A quick glance at the “Country/Area of Origin” index on the last page illustrates the point: Britain has seventeen entries (eighteen if you count the three-panel Hamlet on the Contents page), whereas China, the oldest continuous civilization in the world, has five. The canon, in other words, remains stubbornly centered in Europe.

The problem, of course, is bigger than any one editor, or one book, or one series, can possibly correct. And I don’t know if it would be enough to simply shift the ratio of works from one part of the world or another. Some of the difficulty, I think, is that a canon implies a shared tradition. And I’m not sure one can create a tradition — at least, not such that anyone would recognize — simply by adding contributions to an anthology. There are larger forces at play, which both give this dilemma its urgency and make it, at present, irresolvable.

It may be that, under imperialism, no global canon is possible and, after imperialism, the questions of “canon” will become refreshingly irrelevant.

At the same time, Piskor clearly has his work cut out for him in drawing a book that features a lot of sitting around. He always has the reader in mind when illustrating a scene, breaking the book up into easy-to-digest vignettes, man-in-the-street features, look-ins on other characters, and flash-forwards to Phenicle’s prison experience and railroading by the justice system. That affords him the opportunity to easily jump back and forth in time, but it also makes his historical anecdotes easier for a reader unfamiliar with the subjects at hand to digest. He switches between Kevin’s friend Winston doing a radio show and various people listening to what he has to say, to Kevin as a kid going about his day (with no other narration), to Kevin narrating images via caption (with no word balloons), to having Kevin and Winston in the background of someone else’s story, to a mix of caption narrative and dialogue, to an omniscient narrator commenting on Kevin’s lack of self-esteem. When his characters have conversations, Piskor often depicts them walking and in different poses from panel to panel–anything to keep a reader’s eyes moving across the page. Piskor is also careful to let his pages breathe a bit, including the occasional panel that doesn’t necessarily advance the narrative but does provide a beat or two to slow the story down a bit. His art is mostly naturalistic, with the occasional stylistic flourish. Piskor is mostly about moving along the story. That said, he always adds a certain decorative touch even in talking head scenes; he always goes the extra mile to give us interesting people to look at. I especially like the way he draws hair–scraggly hair and beards on men, odd curls and swoops on women. He revels in the grotesque, creating characters with slumping postures, unkempt hair, shaggy eyebrows, and bad skin.

Piskor begins the book with a series of talking heads, all discussing assorted legends surrounding Kevin. Some folks think of him as a dangerous criminal, others marvel at his remarkable skill, and others perpetuate rumors, legends, and tall tales about him. We’re then introduced to Winston Smith (one of many winks to the reader by Piskor), Kevin’s boyhood friend, who serves as one of the primary narrative devices in the story. While Kevin’s interest in hacking was almost purely a type of intellectual exercise, Winston was more fascinated by its political (and otherwise anarchic) possibilities. Piskor quickly establishes a central struggle for his protagonist, and it’s not an unfamiliar one: a technical wizard struggles to connect with other humans, especially girls.

Piskor manages to evade cliche with this tact through a number of clever devices. First and foremost is his character design. Kevin has blank eyes, much like Harold Gray’s Little Orphan Annie (an idea seemingly inspired by Chester Brown and his Louis Riel). Indeed, Kevin is an orphan who lives with his grandmother, and it’s clear that being yanked out of his loving environment at a young age has much to do with his social ineptitude. At the same time, the blankness of those eyes reveals a certain sociopathic streak–the flip side of social ineptitude. Kevin is unable to physically confront the bullies that torment him but strikes back at them by hacking phone systems and making their lives miserable invisibly. While Piskor clearly has a certain fascination with the abilities of hackers like Kevin, he leaves a layer of ambivalence in his portrayal. That ambivalence plays out as Kevin does try to connect with others and frequently fails as a counterpoint to his otherwise superhuman hacking abilities, especially when he uses “social engineering” experiments to steal from and manipulate others.

Kevin is very much a “can-do” character like Annie, using his wits and skills to outfox adults. Skirting the law is more a matter of testing the limits of his abilities than any real desire to cause harm, whether it’s ripping off software for redistribution or delving into the deepest bowels of the phone company. Unlike Annie, Kevin winds up paying for his mischief in the harshest manner imaginable. Piskor satirizes the media in the face of a local muckraking TV “journalist” in the mold of Geraldo Rivera, who sensationalizes Phenicle’s crimes and drums up hysteria regarding his motives and abilities. The FBI and Ma Bell are only too happy to have public opinion set squarely against Kevin, given the way that he embarrassed both of them for so long. Piskor isn’t exactly subtle in this satire, as the reporter is all but foaming at the mouth in describing Phenicle.

The first and second halves of the book are radically different in terms of tone. The reader is aware that Kevin is in prison without even receiving a trial, but most of the narrative follows childish hijinks and an exacting level of detail regarding phreaking (manipulating the phone system with a variety of tricks) and hacking. The reader essentially gets a primer on both subjects that clearly fascinate Piskor, stretching them over the bones of a narrative. With his TRS-80 computer, Kevin hooks into early bulletin board systems (BBS’s) but quickly grows bored, even when screwing with a particular BBS whose members hate him (as an aside, having a member with the ID “Godwin’s law” compare Boingthump to the Nazis was a stroke of genius). This leads him to copying game software for quick resale, but a virus he stuck into each game as a joke (“Boingthump owns your soul, sucka!”) winds up as an augur of his eventual doom (as well as getting him his ass kicked in the short term by angry gamers). When a teacher of Kevin’s invites him to be part of an inaugural computer science course at his high school, Piskor inserts the narrative of a jealous classmate who rattles off some more of Kevin’s hijinks. Kevin later manages to talk his way into the phone company’s inner office to steal all sorts of useful information, which he uses in small ways (altering bills, charging phone sex numbers to people’s lines, etc.) for his own amusement. That is, until he learns that the phone company was aware of his computer accessing theirs, which sent the FBI after Kevin.

The second half of the book begins with Kevin as a fugitive, gaming the system so as to create new identities as he moves from town to town. There are many images of Kevin sitting in a library, going through records so as to establish his new identity of the moment. Piskor embraces depicting the mundane aspects of the hacker lifestyle, choosing to remain true to details rather than try to make the stories sexier but less true-to-life. Of course, as Kevin tries to elude his pursuers, it does help that there are some actual chase scenes to draw, but these make up only a very small number of pages. The most interesting aspects of this part of the book are the real-world guides to living as a fugitive, like a step-by-step set of instructions on how to create a new identity, the best way to squat in a vacant house, and how to run any number of hustles if you sniff out the right sort of low-life (like a pimp or movie producer looking to spy on his wife).

Kevin becomes even more of a non-person in this chapter, as he literally has to remake himself constantly, both in terms of image and personality. That’s one of the ways Piskor manages to keep the book visually interesting: by presenting a wide array of outlandish hairstyles, clothes, and disguises Kevin uses while trying to stay one step ahead of the law. When dealing with women in this chapter, Kevin pretty much sees them as a means to executing one of his many lucrative money-making schemes. For example, Kevin likes rigging the outcomes of radio contests and uses women to accept the public prize (like vacations), taking cash and other items for trade. He finds the prospect of sex with any of these women to be greatly unnerving.

In earlier chapters, one always has a sense that when Kevin engages in “social engineering” experiments to bilk people out of things he wanted, he tends to see most other people as a means to an end. As a fugitive, that is the only way he could see other people. Piskor contrasts the misery of a life built on sand with a flash-forward (told through the radio show of his friend Winston) of his hellish day-to-day existence in prison. While that last chapter still has certain underground DIY elements (like how to make the most of your prison cell), it’s mostly a grim and repetitive series of scenes that builds up to an explosive climax. Piskor tries to tie together a number of narrative threads in this final chapter and doesn’t quite do it in a satisfying fashion. Characters like the reporter get a comeuppance, but in the end, Kevin is too much of a blank slate for the reader to really care about. Piskor tries for poignancy in the final scene but it falls a bit flat, as Phenicle’s serious injuries in prison scar him emotionally as well as physically. Because the reader has only a passing acquaintance with his emotional state, it lacks the cathartic power that I believe Piskor intended.

Ed Piskor is one of my favorite young cartoonists, in part because his subject matter is such a left turn away from his peers. He’s also unusual in that he takes a lot of his inspiration directly from underground artists like Robert Crumb and Jay Lynch, as opposed to more contemporary influences. There’s a nice looseness to his work that sometimes manifests as a certain sloppiness with lettering and spelling. I was surprised to see this in the book, given Top Shelf’s fairly tight editorial oversight. Overall, his lettering is attractive and clear, but he sometimes drops letters or tries to cram them in awkwardly. The design for the book is clever and funny, one of many nods to the early days of the personal computer revolution that Piskor inserts into the book. Wizzywig was crazy in its ambition as a first major solo work by a young artist, and one can sense that Piskor learned a lot from the experience. We’ll see how this sort of self-made comics PhD program accomplished in future projects.

But there were pockets of brilliance in the USA too. One of the greatest-ever fine art interrogations of the funny pages has to have been Tricky Cad, created by the San Francisco artist Jess (Collins) between 1952-1959. An eight-episode series of cut-ups made entirely out of fragments of Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy, the five known extant collages have been collected and reproduced at a legible size for the first time ever in O! Tricky Cad & Other Jessoterica edited by LA-based art writer Michael Duncan and published by Siglio Press — who also released a stellar 2008 collection of NY artist Joe Brainard’s decades-long body of work deconstructing Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy.

Jess, detail fromTricky Cad, Case VII, 1959. Collage, 19 x 7 inches (original single sheet). Courtesy of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA. Gift of Bruce Conner. Copyrighted by the Jess Collins Trust and published in O! Tricky Cad & Other Jessoterica, edited by Michael Duncan, Siglio, 2012.

Tricky Cad is remarkable on a number of levels. For starters, Jess takes advantage of the ultra clean-line graphics of Gould’s grotesque cop-opera to amp up the pictorial weirdness to 11. Almost every panel stands as a tiny surrealist composition reminiscent of (and clearly inspired by) German Dadaist Max Ernst’s seminal collaged graphic novels of the 1920s and ’30s. Perspective and scale are thrown to the wind. A giant hand holding a key protrudes through a doorway into a dark and frozen meat locker, asking “Too High?” But in spite of its dream logic, Jess’s distortions of appropriated mass media imagery are at once more intelligible, more culturally current, and more laugh-out-loud absurd than Ernst’s.

A large part of that is due to the inclusion of words – Gould’s snappy, hardboiled dialog and Crimestopper Tips are subjected to a fragmentation and rearrangement whose results oscillate between incantory poetics and slapstick nonsense — with occasional bursts of satiric social and political commentary. As a gay man who had quit a lucrative career as a chemist working on nuclear weapons in favor of art, Jess possessed an impeccably alienated POV regarding ’50s mainstream culture. A healthy skepticism toward the authority of language permeates his work.

But in addition to uncovering the hidden beatnik glossolalia in Gould’s staccato noir storytelling – adding a Dada twist missing from Ernst’s wordless tableaux – Tricky Cad was Modern in a way that Ernst’s patched-together insta-nostalgia Victorian engravings never tried to be, not just because they were assembled from contemporary newspapers.

Gould’s Dick Tracy was profoundly influenced by the pictographic possibilities of Modernist formalism – geometric reduction, simplified color, aggressively linear compositions that eschewed photorealist nuance for an almost industrial graphic design immediacy – Gould had a primitivist magpie eye for purified ways of picture-making.

By breaking the linear narrative agenda of the original strips, but keeping the graphic vocabulary intact, Jess identifies and brings to the forefront Gould’s inherent avant-gardism. This undoubtedly would send Chester spinning in his grave — if he hadn’t been very much alive and kicking at the time the collages were made, in the middle of a long slide to the same cultural phantom zone occupied by Al Capp.

Jess, detail from Nance, from A Birthday Pillow Book for James, 1956. Collage on four two-page spreads, each 10 3/4 x 18 inches. From the James Broughton Papers, courtesy of Kent State University Libraries, Special Collections and Archives, Kent, OH. (All images) copyrighted by the Jess Collins Trust and published in O! Tricky Cad & Other Jessoterica, edited by Michael Duncan, Siglio, 2012.

The Tricky Cad collages amount to only about 20 pages of the book’s 192.  Several other comic strip collages are included, as well as a bunch of Jess’s zine-like collage publications, and his unfailingly dazzling “paste-up” collages whose laborious intricacy remains astounding. As an historic landmark of comic book/Fine Art intercourse, Tricky Cad is about as perfect a mutual orgasm as you could record, but as the individual response of a singular intelligence to the pictographic possibilities of his era, it is timeless.

I’ve also been taking her Sad Sex book around wherever I hang out, and people have the same reaction. Folks shut up as soon as they see it, their jaws flip open, they leaf through the whole thing cover to cover, pass it on to the next person, and then announce whether they love or hate it and why, generally at length. It’s great party fun, and cheap at $10, so consider it for your next mixer or family gathering.

It’s been so long since I liked a cartoonist like this, that I’ve forgotten how to write about it. Sad Sex is full of so many complex, primal things, it’s confounding. I feel like I’m staring at stone reliefs of Aztec art, imagining what its language of art might be saying with its particular horrible and sadistic genius, and then making up my own story because I don’t know.

But honestly, this review is also hard to write because her art is largely about a young female perspective on sex, menstruation, sadness about sex, and why sadness about sex is also kind of sexy and funny. And if there’s anything I’ve learned as an aged male, it’s to SHUT UP whenever women start talking about this stuff. You figure that out by the time you’re 13 – women do not want to know what men think of menstruation. They’re never going to sponsor a lecture series called “Men Writer’s Perspective on Menstruation – 5 New Male Voice Speak Out” at your local university. No way.

So, I asked my friend Dame Darcy to help me review this, because I love her perspective on art and women artists, and also because her early work in Meatcake and Rollerderby magazine had a savage, crazy electricity that reminds me a little of Benjamin’s. (I was also one of Darcy’s assistants in the late ‘90s, along with Matthew Thurber and a couple other lucky individuals.) At worst, I hope, this’ll read like one of those long rambling interviews in Maximum Rocknroll – always my favorite part.

I should also maybe say that I was introduced to “Sad Sex” by Thermos Unigarde, the founder of experimental female musician’s group LOXM, who carries around a copy of “Sad Sex” in her custom-made oscillator case and calls it her “talisman.”

So anyway, here’s the interview:

Dame Darcy: I love Sad Sex. But I’m also just going to say: “I’m sorry, Heather Benjamin.” [Sad laughter.] Because I know how she feels — totally ruined — and that things being totally and utterly fucked up are inevitable.

Me: It reminds me a little of flipping through Rollerderby.

Darcy: It is a little bit Rollerderby – very bipolar, and also very borderline personality order. Bipolar because Sad Sex is about extremes, extreme happy and extreme sad. Extreme drama, crashes and emotional mood swings. Being borderline is when you really love somebody and then you instantly…really hate them! And it’s kind of the same, it’s like a flip of the coin.

Me: Yeah, just go back and forth?

Darcy: Yeah, love … hate! Love…hate! Back and forth! I was afraid I had that…I don’t think I have that too bad though. But maybe I’m crazy. I definitely have a mild form of narcissism. (Laughs)

Me: Do you think that’s what all artists have?

Darcy: I think all artists have narcissism, that’s just part of the job. Artists shouldn’t breed. I think it’s a bad idea. Because when you’re a narcissist, you’re a bad parent. You have to be like Jesus to be a parent.

Me: As a parent who hangs out with other parents, I can tell you that doesn’t happen.

Darcy: I want to know, if you were a single guy going out with Heather, and you thought Heather was cute, after you read Sad Sex, would you think, ‘This girl’s been traumatized by sex, uh oh, let’s wait a while.” Or would you think, “Oh goody, this is sexy!” [Laughs.]

Me: I guess I would be encouraged that she thinks about sex, that’s nice.

Darcy: But there’s a lot of freaking and out and crying involved!

Me: Yeah, but at least she thinks sex is really exciting. It’s a plus.

Darcy: She feels highly emotional, and here’s the other thing: I should vent something, particularly for Heather.

I was reading that if a man and a girl have sex and walk away from each other, the girl has ten times the endorphins of the guy, after the sex. So the girl is more biologically programmed to be attached to the guy. While the guy isn’t a reciprocator of the energy and just isn’t programmed to care as much. I’m not saying that guys don’t care, I’m just saying … biologically.

Me: But endorphins are pleasure, that’s what helps you enjoy sex. That’s why people take E. You want women to take a pill to feel less pleasure after sex?

Darcy: Well, I think girls should take an endorphin blocker, so she feels the same as the guy.

Me: No one would take that.

Darcy: Well then, girls would feel like guys do.

Me: Why would you want that? If you have more endorphins, you feel better. How do you know you wouldn’t lose interest in romance and art and just end up playing war video games, if you felt like a guy? Driving around video game tanks?

Darcy: [Laughs.]

Darcy: I love Sad Sex’s bodybuilders. She did a really good job with the bodybuilders. Also, I love “YOU MAKE ME FEEL SPECIAL!” So good.

So, she just needs a hug. I would like to give Heather Benjamin a hug. I wonder what sign she is. I feel for her.

Darcy: Her work reminds me of Mike Diana’s.

Me: She says she’s a big fan of Mike Diana on her blog. They were in an art show together recently.

Darcy: That’s rad. I remember seeing him for the first time – he and Kembra Pfahler were playing around town, doing these hilarious little shows. And from his work, I expected him to look like a freakish horrible guy…

Me: Me too!

Darcy: But instead he looked like a pretty little boy with blond hair in a go-go dancing sailor costume, the faggiest thing I’ve ever seen in the world, and he was super-nice and super-quiet and cute and shy and and weird and pretty.

Me: All the ladies liked Mike Diana back then. The first time I saw him, he was go-go dancing at Squeezebox while Vaginal Crème Davis was playing.

Darcy: So anyway, that’s where I saw him, and being surprised at all the pathos coming out of this pretty person. Her stuff reminds me of that. And he was having that horrible publicity… but Oscar Wilde says there is no bad publicity…

Me: He had to leave Florida though, because of it.

Darcy: But he came to New York, and New York’s better than Florida, so. And he came to New York where he was loved and accepted for being a horrible freak.

Me: So maybe she’s not all messed up, maybe she’s a Mike Diana fan, and art like his, and that informs her style…

Darcy: She doesn’t draw like this because she’s a Mike Diana fan. This is coming from her actual psychotic brain, her art. Not that she’s… I’m sure she’s fine. I’m sure she’s a really awesome person. I’m glad that she’s able to draw, because if she wasn’t able to draw, she would be bottling this up, and probably going bananas. But because she can draw, she can render these images, it probably helps her emotionally.

Me: Isn’t this a fetish, ritualized crying? Maybe it’s something that people like, an aesthetic? It’s just a type of thing she’s into?

Darcy: No, I think “Sad Sex” is just how she feels. I think she gets too emotionally attached with somebody when she has sex with them and then feels vulnerable, and because she feels vulnerable, starts going crazy and feeling really sad. Maybe she had some relationship issues with a parent before, and then started doing this stuff. I think that it’s better that she’s doing this, expressing herself, and being an artist, and turning the coal of her pathos into diamonds, I think this is a good thing to do, it’s the pure essence of what art is. And I really hope she gets to a place where she can be okay with herself and do her art. Maybe she’s already there? I don’t know.

Me: You know what it reminds me of? Especially this illustration? The Joy of Sex that everybody’s parents had in the ‘70s, with the Shugo Japanese sex paintings, where the faces kind of looked like they were crying, and very intense, no one looked like they were happy, it was very intense. Like Tetsuo’s Iron Man.

Darcy: Anyway, our friend here, Heather, seems like someone who would fit right in with the early ‘90s in New York.

Me: She does, right? Why would you say that about her, and not someone else who’s drawing now?

Darcy: I think just the unabashedness of the punk-rockery in her art. It’s just really good. It’s good. I think I used to be a little bit more like Benjamin in the early ‘90s too. I used to draw really, really weird shoes and costumes. I love these shoes on the cover. I’m just trying to be more positive these days…

Me: You feel more positive now?

Darcy: Nuh-uh. I’m TRYING to feel more positive now. What was happening then, was I was always walking around feeling like I was about to explode in a blood bomb. Pain and anxiety. I always felt like that, and my art was just reflecting that. Meatcake was just about how I feel crazy and sad and horrible, and I’m just going to draw this because I can’t stop myself. If I don’t draw this, I’ll explode. That’s what I was dealing with, and so does she.

One of the reason I wrote Hot Witches was I felt like her, all the time, when I was younger, and then I thought maybe I could save younger people from going through twenty years of torture and pain.

But Heather’s being very true to herself in her art, and if you’re true to yourself, you’ll find a place in the world. There’s also sort of a raw passion, how she feels and who she is, what she’s thinking – it’s really good. I like Sad Sex a lot.

Me: Heather Benjamin’s Sad Sex is the cat’s pajamas.

A tangled tale. We’re looking at an autobiographical memoir and a coffee table art book. The art is awesome, the memoir is engaging.

The tale has to do with Malcolm McNeill’s years-long attempts to complete a graphic novel with William Burroughs, a work to be called Ah Pook is Here.  Ah Pook, by the way, is a Mayan god of death.

McNeill met Burroughs in London in 1970, when Burroughs was 56 and McNeill 23.  They worked on a comic strip together, The Unspeakable Mr. Hart, which ran through four episodes in McNeill’s underground newspaper, Cyclops.  The paper folded, but Burroughs and McNeill stayed in touch, hoping to flesh out their comic and create a booklength graphic novel.

What with Burroughs’s literary cachet, and with McNeill’s profound gifts as an artist, they managed to get a contract with Straight Arrow Books, a branch of Rolling Stone magazine.  But they didn’t finish the book while the window of opportunity was open.  The advance was too small to allow for enough working time.  The collaborators were distracted.  Burroughs’s text lacks a clear plot or story arc.  The plans for the project kept changing. And then Straight Arrow folded.

In the end, no other publishers were willing to print the Ah Pook graphic novel.  One complication was that Burroughs and McNeill had moved away from a pure comic strip format—they wanted to mix in blocks of solid text as well as large free-standing illos.  And possibly the heat of McNeill’s sexually intense images was an issue.  If Burroughs prose descriptions of his visions were but marginally acceptable, it may have been that images of the visions were too much.

What sorts of images am I talking about?  One illo from McNeill’s art volume, The Lost Art of Ah Pook Is Here, shows a city scene like Times Square with hard-core porno images within the billboard ads for, like, Coca-Cola, VW, and Cinzano.  The polychrome image sprawls onto a second page that resolves into a slash-mouthed Mayan Charlie-Watts-look-alike lounging at his ease, sporting a huge boner.  Another illustration features a bevy of androgynous girls bearing Henry-Darger-style penises, standing in foamy rubble before a torn American flag, arms akimbo, cocks at full salute.

Some of the smaller images take the form of amazing Mayan glyphs—one of my favorites shows a space-suited astronaut recoiling from a high priest…who’s shooting the astronaut with a pistol.  A mind-boggling scenario.  In one of the conversations that McNeill reports in Observed While Falling, Burroughs mocks the notion of a U.S. astronaut hitting a golf ball on the Moon.  Not if the Mayan priests had been there!

Eventually, since the graphic novel wasn’t happening, Burroughs published his text for Ah Pook in a prose collection that’s long since out of print.  I happen to own a copy of this antho—I’ve been an avid Burroughs fan for fifty years.  I reread the prose Ah Pook while working on my review of McNeill’s books—even though, cockroach-like, the little Burroughs book kept trying to get away from me, scuttling under couches and stacks of paper.  Ah Pook is in a characteristic style of Burroughs’s middle period.  He mixes a true-adventure story with bitter anti-establishment scenarios, gay sexual fantasies, science-fictional visualizations of chimerical mutants, and apocalyptic visions of a biological plague.  An eclectic scumbling of genre prose, anarchist rage, Beat surrealism and homosex erotica.

And now McNeill has independently published his complete collection of draft and finished art for the Ah Pook project in his The Lost Art of Ah Pook Is Here.  It’s a gorgeous book, with a unique mix of photorealism, cartoon line and abstract expressionism—featuring the wild kinds of images that I described above.  In other illustrations, he creates mad Hieronymus Bosch dog-piles of humanity, or dissolves a comic strip grid into a swarm of butterflies.  A weirdly prescient image shows hollow-eyed Arab youths charging towards us through a park.  These aren’t silly-ass cartoons, they’re fine art.  McNeill has in fact shown his works in galleries, and large prints are available online.

His memoir, Observed While Falling, gives us the tale of the quixotic project’s various stages, and of some accompanying synchronicities that entered McNeill’s life.  Whether or not you care about actual and hypothetical variorum editions of Ah Pook itself, the memoir is fascinating, particularly in its depictions of old Bill.

Burroughs in person was more congenial and civilized than he was on the page.  I’d already had some sense of Burroughs as a man from having briefly met him in the early 1980s, and from having read various volumes of his letters—paramount among these collections is his quintessential work, The Yage Letters. I in fact include several chapters of made-up Burroughs letters in my new beatnik SF novel Turing & Burroughs.  And here McNeill treats us to a rich buffet of fresh personal anecdotes.

Although McNeill wasn’t gay, Burroughs repeatedly pestered him for sex, urging him to forget girls and come to bed with the old man.  McNeill calmly withstood the entreaties, and the banter became something of a game. In any case, Bill wanted a lot of erect penises in the illos for Ah Pook, and McNeill dutifully went to porn movies—often with Bill along—and made preliminary sketches.

The results are staggering—the best pictures of dicks that I’ve ever seen.  I think in particular of an image in The Lost Art of Ah Pook Is Here, showing a Mayan musician with an epic hard-on that reaches up to the strings of his electric guitar. A little insect-man with a curled proboscis and a dangling ball-sack stands on the neck of the guitar.  Wonderfully jagged fields of force trail from the guitar to the musician’s hand.  This design was made for a 1978 Burroughs-inspired “Cumhu T-shirt.” Cumhu is a Mayan character in Ah Pook.  If and where this T-shirt was ever marketed isn’t explained.  In any case, McNeill and Fantagraphics should consider reissuing reissue this transgressive T.

One of the pleasures of McNeill’s memoir, Observed While Falling, is reading about hear about his conversations with Burroughs.  Old Bill laid down some tasty aphorisms.  Here’s a few:

“Of course [heart transplants] don’t work.  If the body didn’t want the first heart why the fuck would it want a second one?”

“The purpose of writing is to make it happen.”

“When you talk to yourself, who are you actually talking to?”

If we could fold McNeill’s The Lost Art of Ah Pook Is Here together with the existing Burroughs text, we’d have a riveting graphic novel.  My feeling is that, as Burroughs’s raw Ah Pook text stands, it’s a little too repetitious to fully hold a reader’s interest.  McNeill’s illos would add a leavening agent, a yang for Burroughs’s yin, a lightning jolt that would bring the nodding Frankenstein of the text to life.

But, for reasons that aren’t entirely clear, the Burroughs estate seems not to want this alchemical union to be consummated.  Indeed, McNeill has apparently been required to blank out the Burroughs-prose-containing speech balloons that appear in his reproductions of the 1970 comic that started it all, The Unspeakable Mr. Hart.

Never mind. The impasse is part of the ongoing reality matrix mix. We’ve got the words, we’ve got the pictures, we’ve got the back-story—and it’s fun to collage them in your head.

By the way, as an added fillip, you can find a short YouTube movie by Philip Hunt, featuring Burroughs’s oracular voice reading political Ah Pook riffs over a stop-action video starring a chicken with a rubber head, and backed with music by John Cale.  Although well executed, the video is bleak and ponderous.  It lacks Malcolm McNeill’s wild and cooking madness, Burroughs’s parrot-bright Mayan science-fiction scenes, and the obsessively iterated boy-on-boy sex scenes.

So what does Ah Pook mean? Let’s give old Bill the last word, as quoted in McNeill’s Observed While Falling.  “Nobody seems to ask the question what words actually are and what exactly their relationship is to the human nervous system.”

Ah Pook is a word/image virus.  Study these new books and enjoy the disease.

http://www.rudyrucker.com

In the interest of full disclosure, I blurbed the book. I wrote, “Julia Wertz has become one of the most bracingly raw and honest autobiographical cartoonists without losing an ounce of her irreverent, silly, profane and scathing sense of humor.” That latter point must be emphasized: though Wertz takes on some serious topics and reveals some harsh truths about herself in the course of the book, her sense of comic timing has never been better. While each story does have a roughly chronological narrative structure, Wertz rambles, goes on tangents, and diverges into events and themes that aren’t directly related to the ostensible subject of each chapter. The result is a book that’s all over the place in the best possible sense, as her divergences and references to past books and past events, as well as the way she retells certain events from a different point of view, speak to the complicated, messy way life is lived and experienced.

The cover of the book offers a number of clues to the reader as to what should be expected. A scowling Wertz is sitting on her bed but is nonetheless surrounded by things that are important to her: pens, ink, paper, comics (including the three that were name-checked as big early influences: Julie Doucet’s My New York Diary, Ivan Brunetti’s Misery Loves Comedy, and Carol Tyler’s Late Bloomer), a bottle of whiskey, books about alcoholism and addiction, books about mental illness, books about lupus (including one “titled” Oh Man You’re Totally Fucked) and several other books that have meaning for her. Those comics choices are especially interesting, because I can see elements of the three seemingly disparate cartoonists in her work. She clearly embraced the ramshackle, warts-and-all quality of Doucet’s autobio, the take-no-prisoners humor of Brunetti, and the genuine warmth and emphasis on family present in Tyler’s work. In thinking about Wertz’s book, I think it’s best addressed going theme by theme rather than examining individual stories. From examining the parts, an interesting picture emerges.

Family

Wertz’s family is a constant in this book, and it’s obvious that they not only mean a lot to her, but that they contribute significantly to her daily happiness. Even her father, with whom Julia and her siblings have a somewhat tense relationship, is still portrayed as a kind of weird, lovable crank. While their points of view are wildly divergent in many ways, Wertz’s pride in her mother’s accomplishments is obvious. (It’s always funny when Wertz censors herself because “my ma is gonna read this!”) The sections of the book where a teenaged Wertz has to look after her toddler younger brother are some of my favorites in the book. For someone who has noted elsewhere that she has no desire to become a mother, Wertz is astonishingly good at depicting the behavior of children in a manner that is both affectionate and truthful. While the last thing a teen might want to do is look after their younger brother, there’s a remarkable presentness in how Wertz approaches him, knowing just how to interact with him.

The most important family member portrayed in this book is Julia’s older brother Josh. From the very beginning of the book, when young Josh and Julia are disappointed to be told they can’t marry, only to recoil in disgust when they’re told what marriage is all about (“Now I don’t ever want to be married!”), the duo are their own comedy team. The dialogue that Wertz depicts in this book between them is not only some of the funniest stuff in the book, it also points to their genuine sense of connection, Wertz’s dependence on him during a key period of her life, and an understanding of how to display affection despite their mutual discomfort with sharing and displaying emotions. Josh shows up as a partner-in-crime in a hilarious anecdote about a newspaper job where a lot of hijinks ensued, as a comfort to Wertz when she was seriously ill, and as someone who devoured books the same way she did. Wertz’s upbringing was obviously far from perfect, but despite a weird and turbulent childhood, the warmth with which Wertz discusses her family and how much their travails and successes affects her everyday life is obvious and unusual in most autobio comics. The fact that Josh reads Wertz’s first attempts at making comics and encourages her to do more is obviously something that spurred on her career.

Work and Purpose

“Industry” is clever because its episodic nature allows Wertz to linger on her childhood as much as she does her young adult years. Wertz’s line remains as crude as ever in terms of portraying caricatures of others (her drawings of faces are approximations at best), but she’s aces at depicting body language–especially when kids are involved. When young Julia is disappointed, Wertz loves drawing the stiff, arms-forward pose of righteous indignation– a pose she also draws for the adult version of her self-caricature. This is the section of the book that’s packed with the most gags, as the cynical and occasionally misanthropic Wertz manages to simultaneously piss people off as a waitress while revealing a tireless work ethic. Wertz shoots fish in a barrel with a bazooka with her hilarious accounts of customers obsessed with ranch dressing, the politics of upscale restaurants, sleazy pizza shop owners, etc. Her breathless account of the differences between baby sitting now and twenty years ago (focusing on how much stricter modern parents are now regarding food, TV, etc.) is the longest sustained laugh in the book.

Underlying all of the funny business is the first mention of her alcoholism and how it started to affect her life. In a very matter-of-fact fashion, she relates how it cost her a couple of her jobs. The realization that she had no one to blame but herself for being fired is a dark moment, one made darker when she essentially skates right past it on her way to other jobs. It’s also balanced by her discovery of comics and the realization that she finally found what she really wanted to do after a lifetime of drifting and finding that she was good at something that wasn’t especially meaningful (waiting tables). Even as her drinking problem got worse before it got better (and Wertz notes that this is an ongoing battle), the fact that she could make a living off of doing comics and even be tempted by optioning her life story to Hollywood was an astonishing positive, one made all the more meaningful when she more fully came to terms with her problems.

Relationships vs Solipsism

In “A Strange and Curious Place”, young Julia makes a fort in the living room and declares, upon poking her head out after her mother inquires after her, “There’s nothing for me out here.” She was happy to be in there with her books. Wertz goes into detail about an almost fetishistic love of books, down to the smell and feel of paper. Part of this is fueled by Wertz’s lifelong distaste for being a joiner; she wasn’t continually misanthropic, of course, but she never faked it to fill in. Once again, comics had a huge impact on her life, as she met dozens of cartoonists during a cross-country trip who wound up becoming life-long friends. In her comics, Wertz portrays the way she expresses her emotions as something mediated through various filters, like jokes with her brother. Comics became a filter with which she could develop close friendships built around a common passion, especially considering how bookish and introverted many cartoonists tend to be. Each of the three chapters ends with Wertz eventually expanding her range of relationships during different periods of her life, but there’s no question that she depicts herself as going from closed off to more open to opportunities in each story.

Alcoholism

Wertz notes in the book that she originally intended her follow-up to her book Drinking At The Movies to be about her experiences with alcoholism and rehab. Finding this to be a joyless, frustrating task, she almost lost her taste for creating art until her brother told her that doing a book about one’s own alcoholism in the middle of combating said problem seems counter-productive for both endeavors. The simple suggestion to do something else eventually helped spawn this book. That said, being an alcoholic pervades much of the book. Beyond getting her fired from a couple of jobs, it led her to go the solipsistic route of cutting off most contact because it helped enable her drinking. Simply by acknowledging this now and connecting this heretofore unexplored aspect of her life to other life events, she’s already laid the ground for future explorations of the issue–if she chooses to do so. All I know is that a Wertz-penned book about rehab, even if it has its harrowing moments, is as likely to be as hilarious as anything else she’s done.

Disease

Wertz is quick to note that as unpleasant as her experience with systemic lupus was over the many months it turned her into jelly, she realizes that she was never hospitalized and never faced the sort of struggle that a cancer patient might. That said, The Infinite Wait acts as a kind of antidote to the many Disease Comics that have been published in recent years. That’s especially true in the scenes Wertz depicts of being in a doctor’s office and taking in horrible information in a matter-of-fact fashion. It’s true that Wertz tends to react to extreme news in a nonchalant way as a means to delay or deflect feeling strong, negative emotions, but it’s also true that this is simply part of her personality. Wertz goes into a lot of detail about how her experience with the symptoms of lupus altered her life, stopping short of a PSA but not glossing over the experience either. The scenes with her brother act as a way of grounding her experiences, venting her fears while trading terse one-liners with her sibling. Once again, comics come into play as something she started reading on a whim when regular books tended to exhaust her in her weakened state. She thought comics would be something simple to read but found that her mind was blown by the sheer possibilities that comics had to offer–so much so, that she picked up a pen.

Aesthetic Joy

The Wertz character is a cranky, complaining sort, with the complaints being played mostly for laughs (both at her expense as well as others). The reality is that while a lot of things annoy Wertz, there are even more that delight her. That’s why “A Strange and Curious Place” is such a fun and even inspiring story. With a remarkable level of detail, she discusses not only the books that transformed her life but the building that housed them as one that had mysterious, “adult” properties. Wertz really knows how to get to the essence of places and people and talk in very specific terms about what makes them wonderful or terrible. She has the rare ability of being an astute observer with a sharp mind for constructing and relating vivid, funny anecdotes. Her voice as an author is so strong that these anecdotes, even when presented in a fairly straightforward, episodic manner, always feel organically constructed. Her art really shines when bringing to life an old, beloved street or the house she grew up in.

Her inability to draw convincing faces sometimes interferes with her narratives and is at odds with the way she’s able to simply but competently draw anything else. At the very least, she draws recognizable figures that are easy to track across the book. It’s just unfortunate that part of the punch of her work is muted in that regard. The other problem that Wertz has is a maddening propensity for typos and spelling errors. This book also had a duplicate page in addition to dropped letters, repeated words and other things that should have been picked up by a copy editor. It didn’t affect my enjoyment of the book, but I did find it distracting. Wertz has grown by leaps and bounds into one of comics’ best memoirists and funniest writers, and one gets the sense that the best is yet to come from her. The Infinite Wait feels like a book where the author is taking stock of her own career and starts to beat a new path for herself while shedding new light on old work. By going over old territory with new insights, Wertz not only makes those older books better in light of what is revealed here, she has also crafted a moving and funny new work that’s the best of her career to date.

From Swell

It can be a bit daunting to engage with these sorts of comics; they demand that you accept them on their own terms or not at all. They can be difficult to adjust to as a reader. But once a reader has locked into this style, the stories become impossible to put down. It doesn’t hurt that Juliacks has excellent compositional chops as a cartoonist, seamlessly assembling a number of complicated images on each page. Her figure drawing is simple and usually displays a somewhat primitivist technique, but it’s not unusual to see her go a bit more abstract in her character representations. Juliacks stuffs every one of her pages with powerful imagery, drowning the reader in drawings intended both as information and decoration (and frequently designed to do both). Trying to process that much information on a page (especially when the eye is not led to value one image over another) can be draining as a reader, and Juliacks often goes over the top in jamming her pages to the brim. Still, one can sense the raw energy and excitement present in her comics, and the level of detail certainly rewards repeated readings.

From Invisible Forces

While Juliacks’ comics are certainly self-contained entities, it’s interesting to note that she’s very much a multimedia artist. In fact, she often adapts her comics into performance art, or perhaps it is more accurate to say that both comics and performance art are different outlets and manifestations for the expression of her ideas. The themes are all the same, but the experience of the pieces themselves couldn’t be any more different. Her live performances are built on a series of explosive moments instead of the more static experience of the page. If Juliacks’ comics are the equivalent of being submerged in her ideas, her performance pieces are like having those themes splashed in one’s face. It’s fascinating to see a cartoonist reaching out to a live audience in such a way, achieving a sort of immediacy of reaction that is lacking in comics. These performances can be viewed on her website, but I’m guessing those clips fail to capture the visceral qualities of an actual live performance seen in person. What is obvious is the way Juliacks is able to completely rework her ideas into something that takes advantage of a live performance. The clips of her are kinetic, even frenzied, emphasizing body and movement on the stage as a complement to the way she exaggerates emotion on the page with her figure drawing and decorative flourishes.

Invisible Forces is both a comic and a film, and both are a bit colder and more removed than her other, more emotionally distant comics. This only makes sense, given that the story is about a young woman named Rody Plane whose life consists of one alienating, traumatic moment after another whose mind snaps in and out of contact with reality thanks to the assault of those titular “invisible forces.” Juliacks likes working big, and the 12×7 pages on heavy paper stock contribute to the powerful visual impact of each page, especially given the bright and powerful color choices. That color and the extensive use of negative space is unusual for one of her comics and speaks to the hallucinatory nature of this comic, as Rody goes from staying with her father to working in an insane asylum to living in a hut. The galvanizing conflict for her is the feeling of paralysis in the face of the infinite. Simply comparing herself to the infinite is enough to freeze her in her tracks, much less the the experience of being in an asylum or living in the dark woods. In the end, she only survives by experiencing total disassociation.

Swell is a comic that has been adapted into a play/performance art piece and art installation. It’s about a woman in her first year of college who is forced to attempt to cope with the sudden death of her older sister. Juliacks works big here, working at about 10 x 10″. What’s most striking about these comics is how advanced Juliacks’ sense of composition is. There’s a page where the story’s protagonist, Emmeline, recalls an instance where her older sister, Lucy, smashed a bunch of eggs that Emmeline and her friends had decorated. There are decorative touches framing the page in the form of little eggs, and the panels are framed so as to form an egg. Juliacks changes her approach to a page at a frequently breakneck pace–going from a number of tiny panels in a row to huge splash pages.

The second chapter introduces us to Emmeline’s parents, who are equally at a loss to process Lucy’s death. Juliacks drops hints that Lucy had some kind of mental affliction or processing disorder, judging by the awkwardness she felt in social situations and her general neuroses. This first part of this chapter finds the grieving family trying to sleep and struggling to do so. They all wind up “dreaming awake.” Juliacks introduces each segment with a huge splash page depicting one of the individual characters with a decorated egg-shape in his or her mouth that indicates she is dreaming awake. The next page is jam-packed with panels detailing each character’s fears, hallucinations and neuroses, switching between an omniscient narrator and first-person stream-of-consciousness narration. It’s occasionally a bumpy ride in a narrative sense, but Juliacks has a firm hand and never loses control of the page. When a sleepless Emmeline runs away, that throws her parents even further into panic and paralysis, even as Emmeline feels like she’s moving toward some kind of resolution.

The second half of the book finds Emmeline wandering around the cemetery near her family’s home, her lack of sleep creating a hallucinatory state of mind that in part fuels the grief ritual that she creates on the fly. Above all else, Swell is about the ways in which grief is a powerful emotion that can never be denied–only delayed. And that delay only leads to either madness or an inability to feel anything. Juliacks’ captures that madness in Emmeline, as the rituals she concocts to remember and connect with her frequently difficult sister eventually allow her to journey back to sanity, but only after a harrowing journey. In the meantime, her parents simply clamp up, as they worry that they may well have lost two daughters. There’s a great sequence where the father drives around the driveway in a looping pattern to make himself feel better, even as he relives a childhood trauma.

The back half of the comic is murky and dense, and the cheap newsprint doesn’t do the heavy use of blacks any favors. I found myself wishing for a fancy hardback version with thicker, glossier paper that really showed off Juliacks’ mastery over every aspect of the page. Still, her cartoony and sometimes abstracted character design, her use of decorative drawings to reinforce other images and ideas on the page, and the way she modulates emotion by varying panel and letter size lend this comic a tremendous amount of impact. She’s part of a group of artists that moves with relative ease between the world of comics and the fine art world, helping to redefine how we think about both.

What’s remarkable about the book is the elegant and even beautiful way Van Sciver solves storytelling problems, often dropping away from the grimy realism of the book for near flights-of-fancy. There’s a lovely scene where young Lincoln spots future wife Mary Todd from across the room and uncharacteristically demands a dance, and then winds up charming her with his forthrightness. In a book where Van Sciver makes a point of laying on dense cross-hatching in every background scene, this dance features just the two of them on a panel-free page, moving the eye from the upper left hand corner to the middle right and back down to the lower left. It’s a perfect depiction of the confluence of motion and heady conversation that can occur on the dance floor.

There’s another scene where a down-and-out Lincoln, suffering from depression, is treated by a doctor whose methods of treating mental illness speak to the way that the malady was understood in the 19th century. Van Sciver juxtaposes the text from an article detailing “the remedies for Hypochondriasis” with images of Lincoln undergoing bloodletting, a warm bath, a cold bath, and finally receiving mercury in his mouth to produce salivation as a cure for his debilitating condition. There’s a major set piece involving Lincoln getting roped into accepting a duel and the ways in which he manages to psych out his improvement, like clearing brush with his sword as a crazy person might.

It is a natural thing, I think, given Lincoln’s historical status and achievements, for most American authors to want Lincoln to be a heroic figure and to portray him as such. Van Sciver is careful not to sentimentalize his depiction of Lincoln while still hinting at the qualities that would one day make him great. Or rather, the qualities that would allow him to make a number of difficult and unpopular decisions as president. Lincoln at this point of his life had just helped to push through a bill that wound up bankrupting the state of Illinois, was dumped by his fiancee, was abandoned by his first law partner, and ended his courtship of Mary Todd after being told by her brother-in-law that he wasn’t considered a worthy enough suitor. Despite all of that, Lincoln had a wicked sense of humor (quick with a bon mot and capable of holding a crowd’s attention with a good yarn, both of which Van Sciver demonstrates with a variety of anecdotes), intense integrity, and strong ambition.

Van Sciver carefully develops a number of supporting characters in the book. Joshua Speed is a funny counterpoint to Lincoln’s introverted, lonely character–he’s the man whose bed Lincoln slept in for quite some time when he arrived in Springfield to set up his law practice. He was also a notorious philanderer, with “a different woman in his bed every night”, and Speed teased Lincoln into trying to loosen up, resulting in a hilarious and botched visit to a brothel that Van Sciver depicts Lincoln mumbling “I’m up to no good” to himself as he trudges over. Mary Todd is a strong-willed, whip-smart, and hilarious presence who is drawn to Lincoln’s poetic nature (the scene where they quote Shakespeare to each other is absolutely charming) and who, in Van Sciver’s hands, slightly resembles Lucy Van Pelt. She’s certainly the original fussbudget, but she’s drawn to Lincoln’s Charlie Brown personality, in part because while Lincoln may have suffered from depression, he was far from wishy-washy.

Van Sciver’s greatest achievement in this book is his storytelling restraint. He lets his cross-hatching gets across the grime of a Springfield that wasn’t as civilized as its inhabitants might have thought. He wants to show the reader a different side of the Lincoln we grew up reading about in the history books, but also wants the reader to connect this younger man to the future president. More than anything, he wants to show Lincoln as in some ways a very typical young man: he makes stupid decisions, is fickle in his attentions (Lincoln falls for Todd’s younger sister), and has no idea what to do with his life (while knowing he wants to do something great), and even engages in cruel humor at someone else’s expense.

That comes out in the book’s best sequence, as Lincoln and Todd write vicious, biting letters under a false name to the editor of the local newspaper regarding the dumb policy decisions of the state’s auditor. When the auditor finds out it’s Lincoln, he demands either a full apology or an (illegal) duel to get satisfaction. Lincoln continues to feel the effects of “the hypo” in the form of bright spots in front of his eyes as he suffers from the anxiety that this incident creates, but he doesn’t back down and in fact manages to outsmart his opponent by his choice of weapon (the broadsword, a weapon which works to his advantage because of his reach) and his crazy energy prior to the duel. The duel is called off at the last minute as everyone manages to back down and Lincoln confronts his future brother-in-law, determined to wed Mary. The book ends with that wedding, which is tense with Lincoln’s mixed feelings about both Mary and himself. This is a densely rendered book with a tone alternating between light and dark. It’s about a born performer who is filled with self-doubt, a lonely man whose self-loathing renders those women who are attracted to him as filled with flaws, a sharp man who makes dumb decisions and a kind man filled with empathy who nonetheless can be ruthless and cruel. Van Sciver gets across that like all of us, Lincoln was full of contradictions, was all too well aware of those contradictions, and took a while to negotiate those contradictions. It’s a fine first major work for a young cartoonist.

(Editor’s Note: The following were received on 14 separate slips of paper. We publish them here in no particular order)

 Haiku:

In just some building.

A nameless woman sobbing

at a life injust.

Email exchange:

Hi Rob-

The Comics Journal asked me to review the new  “book” by Chris Ware. It landed with a crash on my doorstep and WTF>?!?!?: it’s enormous and intimidating….taking up half the space on my couch for the past few days and I can’t bring myself to even carefully break the tight plastic wrapping ‘cause that would be the first step to having to sit down, read it, and review the durn thing! What can I even begin to say in a review???!?!?!

-Paul

Hey Paul-

Lol!

Don’t bother opening it. Here’s your “review”:

“Chris Ware has done it again! Ware continues to dazzle and amaze his fans with breathtaking groundbreaking work! There’s never been a book like this before! A new standard is set! Chris Ware has done it again!”

OK?

I’d like to actually take a look at the thing next time I come by…maybe we can carefully break the tight plastic wrapping together.

-Rob

How To:

1. Hold “Building Stories” container in both hands and give it a gentle rattle.
2. Feel the heft.
3. Carefully break the tight plastic wrapping without damaging the box, or “cover”.
4. Take a quick skim of the contents. Count out the 14 individual components. If any are missing, repack and contact the vendor.
5. Do not overlook the valuable information printed on the inside of the lid.
6. Before reading, make sure that your reading area is well lit. If you use glasses while reading, wear them. A nearby magnifying glass is recommended.
7. You may choose to read the 14 components in any order including but not limited to:
   1. Starting with the top most object in the prepackaged pile and work one’s way down like a miner.
   2. Smallest to largest.
   3. Largest to smallest.
   4. Other.
   5. Please be sure to return all components to the box when reading session is complete in respect to future readers.

Fortune cookie:

“Sorry. You will continue to be plagued by self-doubt and remain unappreciated by those around you.”

Real Estate ad:

This 14-story charmer is built to exacting standards. Solidly constructed by master craftsman yet luxurious and appealing. Many distinctive features. Easy access to visual cortex. Some TLC needed. Must be seen to be believed.

Discussion Group Topics:

1. Does the fact that the main character has no name make her easier to identify with or, rather, does her anonymity make her more of an “Everywoman”?

2. In addition to having no name, the main character also has no left leg below the knee. Does this make her nobly imperfect and thus more sympathetic, or is it just a device for the author to explain why it is so hard for her to get a date?

3. Does the reader construct his or her own narrative by choosing the order in which the 14 booklets are read? Since the author is intrigued with the formal properties of his medium while passionate about describing the inability of modern Americans to meaningfully connect except by accident, is this experience any different than a “Choose Your Own Adventure” book?

4. In addition to themes of loneliness and self-doubt there is a wistfulness that pervades the entire enterprise. How does the character of the wise, old self-reflective building, which narrates several passages looking back on its melancholy history of housing indifferent tenants, evoke such wistfulness?

5. Why does something as insignificant as the bee that buzzes in the margins of several of the booklets, rate a booklet of his very own? Why does only he rate a name in a world of nameless humans?

6. Does the title “Building Stories” refer to the fact that most of the actions in the narrative occur within an aging Chicago brownstone, or to the notion that the reader is building stories by using the 14 booklets within to construct an overarching narrative of their own, or to the fact that (as Art Spiegelman has pointed out) stories in a book and stories of a building come from the same Latin word: “historia”?

7. In this digital age do you think that the artist is making a “statement” by creating a book that is so decidedly bookish?

8. Upon finishing this “book” do you want to: Give up any aspiration of yourself as a cartoonist? Wish there were more cartoonists as thoughtful, smart, and competent as Mr. Ware? Be nicer to those around you…even the bees?

Recipe:

Warning: This is one of those recipes for experienced bakers only. It’s not for everybody and not easy to pull off.

Multi-layered cake:

In a large mixing bowl combine:

2 cups of ground humans

1 bucket of a modern America that encourages isolation and loneliness

Stir vigorously until ground humans are thoroughly lost.

Add:

1 cup of self doubt

½ tablespoon of tears

A pinch Parenthood as bitter-sweetener

Bake at 350 until ingredients are warm and firm.

Frosting (Chill all ingredients to sub-zero conditions)

5 cups rendered chicken fat with chicken fat removed leaving just the rendering

Using precise strokes, combine rendering with a jumbo-assortment bag of panels, perspectives, moments, and environments.

Add artificial coloring.

Apply frosting with steady hand and straight-edge. The surface must be absolutely precise, blemish-free, and ice-cold, disguising the warm, sweet inner layers.

Serve with tea and sympathy.

Quote for my students to ignore:

“I don’t draft or script; the drawings and stories form themselves out of the images and what they suggest as I draw them, along with the memories they might dredge up.”

-Chris Ware, Interview with Casey Burchby for The Los Angeles Review of Books, October 25, 2012.

Limerick:

There once was a cartoonist named Ware,

Who made complex comics “ligne claire”.

Some critics would cry

“I cannot see why!

Yet no mistaking the who, what, or where.”

Creative Writing Exercise:

1. Write from the point of view of someone of the opposite sex without being condescending, artificial, snotty, or stupid.
2. Imagine that character writing an assignment for a creative writing class about the building he/she lives in as told from the point of view of the building.
3. While you’re at it, write this story in her/his own handwriting style.
4. …and while your at that,  imagine everything else and everyone else in the building through the imagination and the experience of your imaginary writer of the opposite sex.
5. The only requirement in this assignment is to do all the above and make it all 100% real and believable.
6. Extra credit for ingenuity, pathos, and humor.

Exchange at SPX 2012:

Dan: “Hey, Paul, how would you like to review “Building Stories” for The Comics Journal?”

Paul: “Gee Dan…I dunno…There are so many aspects to it…I just don’t know if I could even begin to communicate the complexity of such a revolutionary enterprise in a traditional book review.”

Dan: “I’ll get you a free copy.”

Paul: “When’s the deadline?”

Riddle:

Q.: When is a book not a book?

A.: When it is e book.

Advice:

Dear Paul,

My boyfriend has given me a copy of “Building Stories” to read. We share a lot of the same tastes, but I am put off by the prospect of having to read all those little panels…and what if I don’t like it?

Please advise.

-Confused English Major

Dear Confused,

I know, I know…on first encounter “Building Stories” seems like a geeky guy thing. But as an English Major, you know that some of the greatest guy  stylists are also some of the greatest softies. Fellas like Hemingway and Raymond Carver put up a macho, no-nonsense front to disguise the fact that they are very perceptive about the human condition and actually have something vital to say about how we interact (or don’t interact) with each other.

Ware is up to the same game here. Instead of clipped sentences and moderate use of adjectives, he is working in a rendering style that is crisp and precise. But underneath this burnished, chilly surface he is extraordinarily perceptive and opinionated. Like both Hemingway and Carver, Ware can catch you unawares with how warm he can be.

Unlike Hemingway and Carver, however, Ware creates believable female characters. His depiction of motherhood might bring you close to tears.

-Paul

A Dream:

So I was starting to write a review of “Building Stories” and was really struggling. It was late at night and I had been working on it for several hours. I went to brush my teeth, and came back to read what I had written with clean teeth. It was such a pathetic attempt to nail down and pigeonhole this sprawling, metafiction, that plays with time and space so inventively yet remains deeply human, that I just trashed it all and went to bed.

That night I dreamt of the review. “It had everything in it … my diaries, the stories from my writing classes, even stuff I didn’t know I’d written … and you know, it wasn’t bad.”

Then I woke up.

I say “package” quite literally, because there are any number of intricate parts that make up this anthology. SP4 comes in a blue folder with comics on the front, back, and inside, depicting the prologue, key, and epilogue to John Miers’ story, “It Is Always Too Late To Save Krypton”. This story primarily uses symbols to depict its dialogue (except in one sequence designed to mimic a Golden Age comic) that tells the story of Superman (here called The Visitor) as a sort of recursive loop where no planet is ever saved. Inside the folder’s flap are three postcards designed to be taken outside and on trips: a game of “Walking Bingo” by Oliver East (in which we look for things like “a wolf tree,” “a massage parlor in an industrial estate,” and “a gate or fence that looks like a painting”), a glow-in-the-dark comic by Takayo Akiyama, and a card by Jenny Robins that’s designed to be planted (her statement in the comic that “ideas take root” is a tad on the nose). The book’s dust jacket is one huge drawing by Katie Green called “Maelstrom I”, a series of swirling patterns of small, repeating objects emanating from her drawing hand in the center of the page, with the admonition to “draw every day.” The strip is recapitulated in the final page of the book, as the reader is drawn back and we see the artist at work, her Bristol board serving as a map of all that she sees.

Copyright 2011 Katie Green

All of this is before we even crack the book. The cover, by Stephen Collins, is itself a clever strip that uses a subway map’s stops as a series of individual thoughts by different riders, with the Red and Blue lines sizing each other up and finding the other pathetic, among many other funny observations. Collins’s wit is also on display in the first story of the book, “The A to Z of Mrs. P”, which is about Phyllis Pearsall, the creator of London A to Z, a famous London mapmaking company. Done in a 6×8-panel grid, Collins silently takes us through her life’s difficulties by way of a guiding green line that is occasionally interrupted by times of tragedy and injury until she found her calling. This opening story introduces the reader to the way the book will unfold: there’s a single spot color used (a greenish-yellow) and every story will hew fairly closely to the book’s theme.

Given that comics and maps already have a bit in common (image and text mixed to transmit information and give the reader a guide to a territory), it’s no surprise that this theme seems to suit its artists snugly. The strongest stories in the book are those where the artists are able to use geographic tropes as part of a narrative. The weakest stories are those that touch vaguely on the subject as a jumping-off point. As an example of the latter, Marc Ellerby’s “Belgish”, Joe List’s “”Bovis the Rabid Island”, and Ste Hitchens’s “Gulls” only connect to the theme in the loosest of senses. Though these stories are nicely drawn, they fade quickly from memory.

Copyright 2011 Luke Pearson

Luke Pearson’s “Experience” is my favorite strip in the book. This is a map both of his house as well as his emotions, drawn diagramatically à la Ware. There are a number of great tiny-lettered jokes, including one where his partner makes fun of him for the small number of phone calls that he gets. Pearson also gets great use out of the spot coloring in terms of design, all angles and triangles. Edward Ross’s “Maps To Live By” is the most emotional piece in the book, as Ross traces back his lineage to his great-grandparents, one Scottish and one Indian. Their son Andy was sent to Scotland when he turned 18 after a lifetime of being made to feel like he doesn’t belong. His most important possession, “one of the few things [his father] ever gives him,” is a ticket and a map to people who can help him. Andy’s son (Ross’s father) also feels adrift and without a real identity, despite having a family. What’s wonderful about this story is the metaphor of life as map, where one can only start to understand oneself through one’s children, because “at least you can show them where you got lost.” The way Ross jumps back and forth in time winds up creating an emotional narrative that links up the fractured chronology, and the way he flips between using smaller and larger panels to emphasize events and faces is equally clever.

Copyright 2011 Joe Decie

A couple of artists used actual maps as background art to ground their narrative. Joe Decie’s “Always/Never” is an emotional and chronological account of his super-ego. Streets and buildings on a map are marked in territories called “Always” (“Tell The Truth”, “Wash Your Hands”) and “Never” (“Throw stones”, “Bite”); these evolve from page to page as the boy depicted ages. The punchline is what the boy says: “Sorry mummy” as a young boy, “Sor-ree didn’t mean to” as a pre-teen, “Sorry! Jeez can you stop going on about it” as a teen (with anxieties mounting), and “Listen, I really regret the circumstances…blown out of proportion…agree to disagree?” as an adult, with “Say you’re sorry” a very distinct entry in the “Never” column. The way that the specifics are organized on the page is quite clever, down to the letters and number keys running around the page. In “You Are Here”, Tom Humberstone and Matthew Sheret provide a key to a group of tightly packed spots on a street, where each number takes us up the street but also tells a fractured narrative of negotiating the streets during a riot. It’s both harrowing and intimate in equal measures.

Copyright 2011 Matthew Sheret & Tom Humberstone

There are a couple of stand-out stories that refer back to mapping emotional spaces. Alison Sampson’s “Small World” is a home map not unlike Pearson’s, but this story is told while she is in the process of losing her job and describes what the things in her flat mean to her: “form follow function” describes a workspace, “an escape and a pleasure” describes a hanging toy, etc. It’s a way of recalibrating and comforting herself until she’s ready to go out and find a new job. Anna Saunders’s “Roots” is less a map than a topographical equivalence between roots and the hands of her mother, showing how her mother’s influence turns her from child into adult (and sapling into tree).

At a tight eighty pages, with no story more than four pages, Solipsistic Pop 4 doesn’t wear out its welcome. Even the lesser stories still serve as pleasant confections, even if they lack the impact of the better stories. It reminds me a bit of Jordan Crane’s old anthology Non in its combination of handmade/DIY flourishes mixed in with the skill of a master designer who takes great pains to create an aesthetic gestalt that goes beyond simple theme. Humberstone’s commitment to showcasing a variety of styles, from cool clear-line works to more primitivist and expressive comics, shows that he’s serious about providing a format that manages to flatter and feature both ends of the comics aesthetic scale. In turn, the stable of artists that contribute take this opportunity seriously and never turn out less than their best work. Tom Humberstone’s commitment to innovation and the confluence of form and content to create something beautiful and moving makes this annual anthology a treasure for the entire comics world.

Ron Regé, Jr. certainly seems to believe that magic is real, anyway — the good kind, at least. What is it called? White magic.

The comics in his new, almost literally dizzying book, The Cartoon Utopia, are packed with visual detail and collect his thoughts on magic in some of its many incarnations: astrology, the occult, sex magic, the “alchemy” of love relationships and other hermetic principles, and communion with animals. It opens with a short introduction by Maja D’Aoust, the self-described White Witch of L.A. who had Regé as a student in her “Magic School” lectures. In it, she describes the otherworldly sense of coincidence that swirled around the group of artists and musicians that took her class during this time.

“So, as you read the concepts contained within the passages of this tremendous work of art, take care, for the utterance of the magic words and their penetration into your eyeballs shall bring the magic to your life as well, and surround your heart — above, below and always,” D’Aoust writes. So right off the bat you know what you’re getting into.

Utopia loosely depicts a race of humanlike creatures of a future world who are as cute yet no-nonsense as Megan Kelso’s Artichoke folks. They go about their business, being gentle and wide-eyed, and occasionally reflect on “the time before people believed in peace” (i.e., now). But rather than following any narrative, the book depicts one psychedelic philosophy after another, breaking the ideas down and explaining them, sort of. Some of these seem to be Regé’s own, some have been pulled directly from his apparently limitless reading, and they’re all brought to life by his disarmingly simple and hippie-ish figures, all almond eyes and flowing hair.

Anyone familiar with Regé’s previous comics will likely see this as a move toward something … more difficult. Packed even tighter with detail and captioned in hard-to-decipher block letters, the visuals are squirrelly but orderly, almost obsessively so. In fact, in its alarming density the work has a needs-must quality that I find so intriguing, as if the drawings were made by a fringe artist in a fever to get his ideas out there but with limited access to materials. Almost impossible to categorize, the work in Cartoon Utopia is both fully realized in a formal sense and wonderfully idiosyncratic. Like, it’s really out there.

“The old patterns of culture are breaking up!” Regé warns us early on. “The new patterns are being formed!” He depicts the difficult and forward-thinking philosophies he admires; some of the people quoted include Blake, Goethe, Alan Watts, Manly P. Hall — all of them mystics as much as writers, artists and thinkers. He’s interested in the nature of the universe and our interaction with it (i.e., magic): “Light can be slowed down and condensed into matter. Change the number, change your tune, turn the dial on the Prima Materia — once you know the frequency of something you can create and transform it. … Apply your consciousness to the ether and give it form.” He also deals with the inherent mysticism of animals, and the way we (can, but rarely do) relate to them: “You can share your consciousness with anything because we are all one thing.” Much of the book reads like this, a recitation of beliefs that makes the work feel something like a textbook or even a prayer book.

But to me the work is much stronger when it depicts magic in action, which Regé accomplishes by telling us stories about historical figures and their relationship to the natural world. Unfortunately, there are only a handful of these: There’s the tale of coincidence regarding Jung, a young client of his, and a scarab beetle; the piece about Tesla and the deep connection between his life’s work and a pigeon of his acquaintance; and my favorite, the moving story of Mesmer and his companion canary, who followed him everywhere and died within moments of Mesmer’s own passing. All of these passages accomplish Regé’s apparent goal of teaching us something about magic, and they require much less head-scratching to figure out.

It’s also sweet when he gets personal, as he sort of does by telling little anecdotes about Sun Ra and talking about music in general. “All creative art is music!” he proclaims, and whether or not you know he’s a musician — Regé plays drums in the exuberant freak folk act Lavender Diamond — the declaration seems to carry more weight than some of his others.

***

Most of the text in Utopia is interwoven with its drawings, and it’s rendered in a cramped and uniform way that makes it difficult to read or even pick out from the surrounding art. This has the interesting effect of making the experience feel more like deciphering than reading, as if we’ve discovered an ancient holy book or are coaxing forth meaning from patterns in the natural world. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the book itself is like a magical thing, and reading it calls to mind the ideas of divination and conjuring.

Picking my way through the comic’s strange trains of thought, I was put to mind of the work of self-taught artist Justin Duerr, who has been making his quasi-spiritual, apocalyptic art zine Decades of Confusion Feed the Insect — in the old-school, photocopied style — for some fifteen years. His work, too, is crammed with vertiginous detail and prophetic writings, and also has an essentially hopeful message. A longtime, beloved member of the underground art scene in Philadelphia, Duerr has recently achieved wider acclaim for his documentary film Resurrect Dead, which is in turn about the really outsider artist behind the Toynbee Tiles, a street art project that makes oblique references to shamanism, government conspiracies, and life on Jupiter.

All this to say: Some of The Cartoon Utopia reads like the loony but often prescient ravings of a madman-prophet, the kind you’re sometimes treated to on the subway. I guess that sounds insulting, but I don’t mean it that way. Those moments of authenticity and surprise — the joyful and unsettling shake-up of the everyday — are among the things I find most exciting in life, and Regé’s work teems with them, breaking down the expected order of things with the intention of installing a new one. I’m reminded of a quotation from Death By Black Hole by everybody’s favorite astrophysicist, Neil deGrasse Tyson: “One thing is for certain: the more profoundly baffled you have been in your life, the more open your mind becomes to new ideas.” Consider me baffled, but in a good way.

If you’re a mere mortal like me, you may need to read this book in small installments rather than attempting to cram it into your brain in one straight shot. Treat it instead like the religious text that it almost is, and school yourself over time.

The volume opens with a grid of purple and black rectangles, the purple ones stacked in pyramid formation so that they approximate the shape of a hive, which looms over the decrepit quasi-Middle Eastern city wherein our protagonist has found himself waylaid after chasing a ghost cat through a portal in his mom’s basement. Never mind that it’s a shade borrowed from somewhere else in the story – from our hero Doug’s deceased father’s robe, which he pulls on in a moment of distraction before leaving behind life as he knows it.

“Dreaming with eyes open, shuffling images,” Doug recites in a not-too-warmly received Burroughs homage in a punk club, in X’ed Out. It’s the clearest description of what we encounter in this unusual narrative.

Doug is trying to process an unspecified trauma, perhaps due to drug abuse, injury, mental illness or grief. His girlfriend Sarah has disappeared. His dad has wasted away. It would be safe to say that a range of looming crises are competing to send him over the edge.

It’s the late seventies. While the series pays tribute to the nascent punk scene, Doug is getting perilously close to an Elvis-style exit — all those red pills are making him bloated and sad, with a propensity to burden strange women with his relationship issues.

In the first installment we watched Doug, his head bandaged, trying to make sense of his surroundings as Nitnit, aka Johnny 23, in a dusty, crumbling city beholden to a towering hive. In part two he’s more or less joined its ranks of drones, having gotten a job pushing a maintenance cart, distributing reading material and supplies to the sad eyed “breeders” (aka women) confined to their beds.

Colleen, the girlfriend from X’ed Out, reappears as a distressed breeder in The Hive named Lily. She swells with what I’d guess to be one of those huge red and white splotched eggs under her hospital blanket. The story (and Doug’s subconscious) quickly moves on to another breeder, a quasi-Sarah named Suzy, who is seeking the missing issues of her favorite romance comic.

The cast of characters found in Nitnit land includes mutant, decrepit or aged quasi-ethnic shopkeepers and loiterers, or otherwise quasi-human piglet men and humanoid lizard drones. The creases, scars and raw wounds on their hyper-specific faces contrasts sharply with Nitnit’s smooth (Caucasian) mask face, fixed in an expression of frazzled dismay.

The Hive references the pre-PC ethnic caricatures of Tintin comics and presents an Orientalist fantasy realm that is confusing and disorienting on purpose. In Nitnit, words, faces, roles and customs are indecipherable. Our comfort in recognition is partially dismantled. It looks almost like a place we could inhabit, and yet that only makes it more troubling as we strain to find a way to make sense of the gaps, where it betrays us. Johnny 23’s confusion is ours. Aggro lizard dudes berating you at every turn certainly don’t help.

Back in “reality,” Doug and Sarah love and lose each other in dreams, digressions, reminiscences and sub-plots, their tragic romance playing out by proxy in the pages of an overblown sixties comic called, alternately, Ladies’ Special Dream Man, Throbbing Heart and Young Love.

Sarah’s ex-boyfriend, a menace kept conveniently just out of frame, (as is Doug’s mom) is almost certainly to blame for her disappearance. But we won’t find out exactly what happened till part three, if at all.

Other oddities abound: Doug and Sarah actually begin to morph. They sport the same shoulder length bob with bangs at different junctures in the story — and then you notice that their faces are drawn the same. Keeping in mind Burns’ fabled meticulousness, there can be no unintended coincidences in a narrative as painstakingly executed as this.

Burns’ clean, highly refined style contributes to an unnerving reading experience when reconciled with the slippery, seething and roiling quality of a story as it’s taking place — on multiple levels of consciousness, timeframes and planes of existence.

Visual motifs abound: eggs, streams, holes, self-portraits, passageways, incisions — and thematic ones too: public mortification, pockmarked memory, gaps in time. The image of a flood, seen on his dad’s TV in X’ed Out, reappears in The Hive as a seething morass of puce-colored water. On the title page, Nitnit/Johnny 23 is poised on a rock in the middle of it. Later, Fat Doug rides his bed down it.

The slippage between inside and outside, dream and waking, me and you, past and present, extends even to the dead and the living – illustrated amusingly in the way the lurid foodstuffs in Nitnit land – a grub wrenched out of a rotting schwarma type thing, for example — wriggle and snarl at you, even as you’re about to eat them.

Burns has incorporated any and all narrative strategies into this saga, in layers upon layers fanning out in all possible directions. We get photography as evidence, comic within a comic, punk cultural history, romance, drug trips, dreams, alternate universe and homage, all working together. For Burns, more is more. A strange thing to say about a 56-page document, but there it is.

The Hive is a “quick read,” obviously. You can get through it in 15 minutes if you have to. But why would you? We’ve got nothing but time till the next one comes out. Burns is making us slow down and savor this morsel of brilliance in a timeframe that starts to even out the ratio of writing time to reading time. If that’s vindication for an author — one whose visual style incorporates thousands of beautiful hash marks, each tapered perfectly with a tiny brush — then I’m all for it.

Part three is called “Sugar Skull.”

A quick survey of Santoro’s comics reveals his abiding interest is in page structure, the way various illustrative elements, in different panels and on facing pages, correspond to one another horizontally, vertically, and diagonally (it’s akin to Giacometti’s drawing technique, which was a way to conceptualize drawing in space, a quality that describes his sculptures as well). Santoro knits panels together, and in moving the eye in such specific ways, he draws the reader purposefully through the book. But Pompeii is unique among Santoro’s comics in that the story’s themes work in tandem with its page structures; that is, mirrored page designs and inverted figurative elements are similarly expressed in the narrative’s exploration of doubling and reflection.

It’s there in the opening spread of Pompeii, where one page inverts the other. On the left, the crescent-moon hull of a ship cradles the sky above and is buoyed up from below by the ocean, which is indicated by a series of troughs and peaks. On the right page, the void of the sky becomes the rising bulk of Mount Vesuvius, while below it lies the vast emptiness of the Bay of Naples, which sits across the spread from the solid mass of the ship. In the bottom third is an aqueduct, whose supporting arches are the convex repetitions to the waves’ concave undulations.

And if we close the book and examine the cover, we see that it’s there, too, in a Venn diagram, which connotes both similarity and difference. What’s more, the area of overlap between the two circles creates an almond shape—an eye—with a third circle inside it that forms the pupil. For above all, Pompeii is a book about seeing—or not seeing, as the case may be.

The story follows Marcus, a young expat from Paestum who works as an assistant in Pompeii to Flavius, a seemingly well-regarded painter. Flavius is also a womanizer, and much of the action concerns a madcap rush to hide one woman—the princess, a potentially significant patron and new lover—from another—Alba, Flavius’s regular model and lover. The feat is carried off through a series of exchanges: Flavius and Marcus trade out the portrait of the princess for a landscape painting, thus erasing her presence from the studio; meanwhile, the princess hides in another room behind a portrait of Alba, becoming, in a sense, the very person who must, Flavius explains, never know she’s there.

But even before he shuttles the princess out of the room, Flavius smooths the way for her disappearance. The sequence—one of the book’s best—begins with a close-up of the tip of Flavius’s paintbrush coloring in the pupil of the princess’s eye (remember the cover?). With his gaze on the portrait, Flavius asks Marcus, “What do you think? … Are the eyes correct?” On the next page, the first panel in a stack of three shows the princess in three-quarter profile, looking away from the reader and from Flavius and Marcus (shown from the shoulders up, she resembles a statue); the direction of her gaze is evident from the next panel, in which Flavius requests that she look at him, while Marcus scrutinizes the painting. In the bottom panel, Flavius and Marcus look directly out at the reader; Flavius says, “That’s her, no?” to which Marcus responds, “Yes, Maestro. Beautiful.” But who is meant by “her”: the flesh-and-blood woman or the painted one? Santoro seems intentionally to obfuscate the direction of their gazes so that the object of their admiration is unclear. The question then becomes, Which is the representation—the woman on the canvas or the woman who, at the top of the facing page, appears in the same three-quarter view as before, but now with eyes closed, unseeing and soon to be unseen?

Marcus is also subject to Flavius’s machinations. After the women depart, Flavius takes his apprentice to task, demanding that he do a better job of keeping his competing interests separate. As their conversation becomes heated, Marcus’s head begins to sink below the level of the panel border, disappearing as it does so, until only his eyes and nose are visible—his humiliation made literal on the page. Finally, in a pair of horizontal panels at the bottom of facing pages, Santoro reduces the view of Marcus to a tight close-up of his eyes (in the same way he earlier reduced the princess to a pair of statuesque busts). “I’m just telling you how I feel,” Marcus offers in the first of these panels, explaining his reluctance to participate in Flavius’s deception. Flavius counters angrily; Marcus’s feelings are the least of his concerns—he needs Marcus to work the levers offstage, not to be an actor in the drama (theatrical curtains abound in Flavius’s studio).

The inversion from the opening recurs again at story’s end. Here, the reclining form of the princess (one supposes it is a view of the painting, but it could just as easily be an image in Marcus’s mind—of the portrait or the sitter) is transposed on the opposite page by the towering peak of Mount Vesuvius. But the bottom panels on both pages are nearly identical: Marcus at his worktable, with the dormant volcano filling the window. The mirrored scene is ominous because any change from one panel to the other has yet to occur—and the reader knows that it will, and that the change will be utterly devastating. But that inevitable explosion may also find its double in Flavius and Marcus’s inability to hold down a different mountain.

Santoro’s drawings are wonderful; his reduction of figures to tone and line and shape recall illusionistic Roman frescoes and the drawings of Giacometti and Émile Bernard, but endowed with comic-strip dynamism. But if Pompeii were just a series of clever sight lines and intriguing artwork, it would not be as satisfying. It isn’t necessary to see a book’s undergirding to appreciate what it does, but here, the story’s physical structure is married to its themes, and to be aware of one is to be more appreciative of the other.

The book is roughly divided into three separate story sections. The first opens with a sheet of tracing paper with a hole cut out of it in the center prefacing a series of images of a diving woman. Her back is turned to the reader and her head is tucked into her knees as she dives into what seems to be the void of space. Each successive page contains a single image of the woman that is further distorted against a background that turns the white dots into white lines that eventually coalesce into classic psychedelic patterns. The more the body of the woman is distorted, the more intense the pattern becomes until the page explodes into a cacophony of diving images and lines strewn across the page. The focus then turns to an illustration of a man staring at something under a microscope and another page with a hole in it, this time observing a series of women. Jankovic once again mixes media, repurposing what look like photos of models from fashion magazines with her own drawings, patterns, and spot colors. I’m not sure if the man with the microscope is supposed to represent the male gaze, but this section is a bizarre lampoon of fashion by way of sci-fi ideas and diagrams. For example, the first image is of “Loretta” who is “using a “baerbacle gland. It’s a 3-leveled gland with high impact on invisible brain, or so-called ‘the 3D eye.’ It disperses the accumulated mental mist which then you can remove.” The accompanying photo of a woman sticking a bizarre, tentacled object into her nose looks is made to look like something out of Cosmo.

Each subsequent page talks about consciousness and the attempt to exist “in all dimensions simultaneously,” which is what Jankovic is trying to portray here. It becomes impossible to really perceive what is referred to as consensus reality in such a state, and Jankovic flips it around so that the reader is having trouble perceiving the characters who are in that state. Hence the different levels of existence in the form of photos and drawings, psychedelic fields, etc. This process isn’t without humor, as Jankovic portrays the attempt to “mold one’s consciousness into a perfect shape” as a kind of Bundt cake. The next section contains a number of photos of models altered to look like they’re wearing some kind of tribal/ritual mask or face paint, their bodies fracturing into multiple iterations that once again reflect this impossibility of perceiving another consciousness in both time and space. Jankovic once again hits on a synaesthetic approach by telling the story of a tribe that plays musical instruments to create this kind of collective sound whose purpose is “to unite the universe,” removing distinctions between one and many through that vibration. It’s a literal transformation that has certain Buddhist qualities, as the effect only lasts as long as music is being made (being apart from the everyday world). When it’s over, people go back into the world in every sense.

The final story is the most fascinating and intimate. Jankovic tells of a woman who becomes fascinated with holes left after facial injuries, connecting those holes with “endlessness and eternity.” The character starts cutting holes into her body, with the goal of “destroying my given identity to get closer to the universe.” She starts putting electronic chips and metal plates into those holes, the pain bringing her to orgasm as a kind of cybernetic entity. From there, she starts to get off to the hum of microwaves until she hooks herself up to the internet, using computer commands to involuntarily move parts of her body. The accompanying photos of disembodied eyes, mouths and breasts are unnerving but also reassuring given the text. The end of the story cycles around to the beginning of the first story, as she merges with the internet, realizing, “Internet is universe. I’m the universe. I’m everything. I’m happy.” It’s a recapitulation of the recurring theme of wanting to escape from one’s own body and consciousness, of reconciling the sensation of being embodied with wanting to be part of the infinite. The book ends with a further recapitulation of these ideas through a series of images of women transformed in a number of different ways. This is a fascinating, challenging book that demands a lot from its readers, but winds up revealing much about its artist and the ways in which she perceives reality, aesthetics, and culture.

Nao Brown is a hafu (half-Japanese person) living in London, though she considers herself to be British thanks to her mother. She’s an artist and designer with a closely-held secret: she suffers from obsessive-compulsive disorder/pure obsession. The way this condition manifests is different for each individual, but for Nao it comes in the form of intrusive, homicidal thoughts. OCD is closely linked with depression and feelings of worthlessness; in Nao’s case, she tries to combat these feelings with her mantra of “Mum thinks I’m good,” as well as reminding herself of the other people who don’t think she is a horrible monster capable of murdering children. Dillon manifests these thoughts in jarring sequences where Nao actually appears to do something horrible (stab a pregnant woman, push someone in front of the train, smash someone’s head into a wall), only to quickly shift back to reality. At the same time, there’s a fantasy sequence involving a character created by Nao named Pictor, who must try to rescue his squabbling family after being turned half into a tree by a being called the Nothing. Dillon has described these sequences as a cross between Moebius and Miyazaki, and that’s fairly apt. The intensity and vibrancy of detail of Moebius is there, along with the dark storytelling tendencies of Miyazaki.

The book follows Nao as she tries to live her life and find love. Dillon is wise not to spell out Nao’s mental illness too explicitly at first, jarring the reader with her violent ideations and concomitant ranking (“7 out of 10″, with a higher number being worse). The book is most interesting when Dillon follows her daily routine and her attempts to cope with her illness while sharing it with no one except her flatmate. At the same time, he’s careful to make this a story about a set of characters with their own unique qualities and not just a set of symptoms. Dillon loves drawing rumpled characters of various shapes and sizes, all of whom are clearly dealing with their own issues (more on that in a moment). Nao’s friend and employer Steve is a short, twitchy mess. Nao’s crush and later boyfriend Gregory is a friendly bear of a man who’s not quite aware of his size. The grizzled and worn man at Nao’s Buddhist center has what she calls a “Shane McGowan smile,” a jagged assembly of snaggleteeth. These are bodies that really occupy a space, and it’s a genuine pleasure to see them interact.

It’s no surprise that in a book about an illness as inherently self-absorbed as OCD that Nao would experience the fundamental attribution error. That is, she assumed that everyone’s behavior and attitudes had something to do with her at all times, instead of realizing that everyone else had their own set of issues. She’s incapable of seeing that Steve is in love with her and always has been, believing that he thought of her as a sister. She’s unable to see that Gregory has deep-seated pain of his own that he’s dealing with by using alcohol. While she tries various techniques to work on her issues (including “homework” that involves writing down her bad thoughts), she’s too ashamed to actually discuss them. At the same time, she’s charmingly odd in other ways, like disabling her flatmate’s washing machine in order to get a repairman she has her eye on to come up and fix it and entice him into asking her out.

The main problem I have with the book is that when these problems come to a head, the way the plot unfolds winds up being fairly predictable. In a book filled with the anxiety that something bad might happen, it’s inevitable that something bad will happen, if only to shake that feeling out into daylight. Something bad happens to Gregory after Nao has a huge freakout when she doesn’t hear from him all day (resulting in her barely being able to keep it together), and they then have a huge fight where he calls her terrible. Telling someone who constantly thinks that they are evil and worthless that they’re horrible is possibly the worst thing you can do to them, and her interior monologue spills out, demanding and then pleading that he say that she’s not horrible, shouting out “10 out of 10!” over and over. Dillon then pulls out what I thought was a bit of a cheap shock and has something bad happen to Nao, and then fast-forwards several years into the future. The crisis she experiences, one that involves real physical pain, permanently alters the way she perceives the world and allows her to practice mindfulness without the constant, rushing distraction of her own thoughts.

While I appreciate that Dillon moves the characters to their final destinations without leaning on the easy sentiment of emotional moments of realization, it feels perhaps a bit pat and happy–almost too easy, in a way. Like the parallel fantasy story told in the book, there are rough times but a happy ending. What changed my mind about the ending and brought me around is the chilling final image of Nao’s son, looking much like his mother in the first image of the book: a cool, funny photo of a confident-looking child. In Nao’s case, she was really a twitchy mess in that photo (but was always good at hiding it), and the fear is that he may well wind up the same way. Dillon spells this out a bit too plainly, but it’s a powerful image nonetheless. For the most part, Dillon is careful not to over-write in this book, letting his art tell most of the story, but he could have gone even further in that direction. While he lets Nao’s OCD reveal itself to the reader, he does somewhat spill the beans on the first page when Nao tells the reader that she’s “a fucking mental case.” It’s a tricky balance, especially for a first-time writer, but Dillon mostly manages to deftly juggle intensity, sincerity, humor and raw emotion.

Thoroughly researched enough to belie its “graphic novel” self-descriptor, The Carter Family is also an ill-fated love story set mostly in the southern United States during the years leading up to and following the Great Depression. Its subtitle – Don’t Forget This Song – bears witness to the rich, ever-changing river of folk culture in which its principals – not to mention its creators themselves – flourished.

The Carter Family consisted of A. P. (Alvin “Pleasant”) Carter (1891-1960), his singer/autoharpist wife Sara, and her guitarist cousin Maybelle. Lasky and Young depict their quietly epic artistic rise and fall over the course of forty-three short chapters titled after the tunes they immortalized. (The eighteen-minute CD of Carter Family tunes included with the book almost feels like a relic itself.) Young, a former Comics Journal managing editor, and Lasky have extensive experience with graphic history, both in the pages of Tower Records’ Pulse magazine and as co-creators of Oregon Trail: The Road to Destiny (2010). Their pacing is impeccable, as each succeeding vignette contributes to a single stirring portrait of an exceedingly humble cultural comet. The effect is biblical. The first crowded panel of “Carter’s Blues,” for example, finds A.P. standing amid his pigs in 1927, anxiously awaiting word about the Carter’s first Victor recoding session, while the last, fourteen panels later, is a revelatory full-page image of the family’s home in the spacious Appalachian hills, the lyrics of “The Wandering Boy” floating above it like a heavenly portent – with a little subtle foreshadowing (“Out in the cold world and far away from home / Somebody’s boy is wandering alone”).

Lasky’s visuals are flat, solid, simply yet elegantly composed, and deceptively static considering the amount of emotional information and actual velocity they convey. (At two points in the book the pair move the story forward with palette-cleansing segments in the style of contemporary comic strips.) The Carters seemed to be constantly in motion, whether walking miles down Virginia country roads to visit family (Lasky’s autumnal colors may be the finest in all comicdom); taking a horse and carriage to Bristol, Tennessee, for A.P. and Sara’s seminal recording session; hitting the road in a broken-down car as a constantly exhausted traveling act; driving to New Jersey for yet more recording sessions; or commuting to southern Texas for months-long stints as regulars on powerful Mexican radio station XERA. The cause of A.P. and Sara’s eventual divorce is the hapless bandleader’s devotion to “song catching,” i.e., combing the country, often accompanied by his African-American sidekick Lesley Riddle, in search of material: the old and nearly forgotten folk songs he transcribed, rearranged, recorded, and sometimes rewrote in order to reclaim them as his own. What more elegant songwriting credit has anyone taken than the verse A.P. added to the song whose title serves as this book’s subtitle: “But now I’m upon my scaffold / My time’s not very long / You may forget the singer / But don’t forget this song.” The Carters’ saga is also the story of evolving recording and playback technology, and Lasky lovingly depicts cars, instruments, microphones, disks, Victor Talking Machines, and the always-impressive Orthophonic Credenza record player – the latter a gift from the trio’s somewhat larcenous mentor-manager.

The Carter’s story takes a melancholic twist when Sara falls in love with another man. And its most poignant panel may well be Lasky’s translation of Life photographer Eric Schaal’s iconic image of the extended Carter clan in 1942, with A.P. standing slightly apart from brother Eck and the rest. As often as Lasky’s art inevitably reminds one of R. Crumb light, he conveys a sadness and delicacy of mood the master might envy. Graphic biographies from Tezuka’s Buddha to Spain Rodriguez’s Che tend to transform their subjects into superheroes. Frank Young and David Lasky, on the other hand, will charm the pants off you with a book full of characters who are all too human.

If anyone is left in some future to consider the catastrophe machine that was the late 20th and early 21st centuries, they could do worse than consult the work of Gary Panter. Not for answers (he has none), but for a perspective more revealing precisely because less filtered than the supercargoes of crap dumped daily onto our suffering minds and souls in the service of Consensus Narrative.

Dal Tokyo is what science fiction writers call a “fix-up”: a book less planned than assembled of occasional, Frankenstein parts: in this case, two comic strips separated by more than a decade. The occasion for the first series was a weekly strip that ran in the LA Reader during 1983-84, height of the Reagan years. The second series ran monthly in a Japanese reggae magazine from 1996 to 2007, during the awful (and ongoing) Clinton-Bush-Obama period, which has offered us so much continuity of all things so curiously American.

So it’s more and less than a book. Even its physical “bookness” is awkward: 6 1/4″ vertical by 16″ horizontal. About the size of a desktop computer keyboard, if you’re looking for a familiar correlate, as Panter always is. Opened, it’s twice as horizontal. You can’t make space for it; it makes space for itself. But the awkward size is intrinsic to its even more awkward contents: some of the finer details of the art and writing are barely legible even at this scale, which is reduced I’d guess about 50% from the originals. I shudder to imagine what they looked like in the LA Reader.

So think of it as a comic strip, a periodic commitment. A blog before and after its time, a day book spanning three pitiless decades. Each strip of the first series is time-stamped, by hand, to the minute, testimony to Panter’s living and working and recording in the here-and-now of it.

Not that there is ever (but once) anything like direct comment on our own here-and-now; Dal Tokyo is set on “Mars.” From Panter’s preface: “Jimbo and my other cartoon characters live on Mars in a well-established planet-wide sprawl of a city that was founded by Japanese and Texans.” The first four pages of the “story” are a beautiful set of overlay maps with these titles: Tokyo rail system 1930; Upper Triassic; Texas highways; Lowell Observatory 1896 (a map of Percival Lowell’s fancied “canals” of Mars).

So yes, we could pretend that Dal Tokyo is “science fiction” set on a terraformed Mars settled by Japanese and Texans, with some dinosaurs (they did roam in Texas) thrown in — and I’d vote for it in an instant in the Hugo or Nebula awards — but it’s more fundamentally a construct in the surreal obsessive-compulsive imagination of Gary Panter, a longtime occupant, a lifer, on our own Planet Xtinction, as astute and ornery and doomed as William Burroughs before him — another refugee from the flat middle of the country where you can see what’s coming for you a long way off — with a febrile subconscious informed by the relentless boombox of American empire, corruption, hypocrisy, media, and the manifold collisions that ensue.

Panter numbered all these strips, dual-numbering the second series starting at 1 and continuing the first series numbering, up to a point, when he dropped the first series numbers. There’s no break in the book to indicate any division between the two series, and you could easily miss it. For clarity I’m going to number the first series 1:1-63, and the second series 2:1-137. There are 210 strips in all.

Early on there’s an attempt at story, and to this point the strip has a pretty fair claim as a “science fiction” narrative: 1:44 and 1:45 lay out a plot summary and a kind of map of “the story so far.” At this point Panter identifies 30 characters, and several plot threads. Then, as if by this clarifying effort the ramifying scale of the story was suddenly borne home to him, or its irrelevance to his project, it’s sidelined.

1:46 and 1:47 are visual chaos with no text. 1:48 has this top caption: “South-side R.P. busts the robo-match, so Nabsig Sybig heads out, porno rag in hand, with a bunch of rabid-control nerfs and their chugging gladibotors.” So a narrative is still being carried forward, sort of. But more to the point is a bottom inset, nostalgic for Sunday color comics puzzles: “Can you find: Hoopy? Kilroys? Hona? Konga? Spiffy? Bozi? Oboe? Oars? Revolver? Swivel chair? Tadpole? Flounder? Fluke?”

There were already formal signs this abandonment of story might happen. After 1:31 the strip’s form becomes as square as Peanuts: always four panels of equal size, with an inset Dal Tokyo “title” and an inset “next:” caption. However, the panel bars go up only halfway so the art is likely to spill across the notional panels like a Pollock, and the title bar, even the title itself, keeps changing (Dalk Yo Toh, Dal Taco, Dill Pickle, Dollokyo, etc.), and whatever is promised by “next:”, like so many hopeful expectations, is perpetually unfulfilled.

After the 1:44 roadmap, there’s still progression, and a semblance of narrative, though increasingly bereft of logic, plausibility, or goal — scenes as enigmatic yet veridical as a surveillance-video screensaver that shifts among unlabeled cameras around the planet. The captions still connect to the art. The map makes some surface sense; only the world it maps does not. In this it resembles many PowerPoint presentations, or US foreign policy. But by the end of the first series, Panter is clearly exasperated or overwhelmed with the burdensome complexities of his own creation, and in the last strip, 1:63, he just blows it up: “Yah Tah Hey’s apartment was blown to toothpicks as the crystal followed its catastrophic psychic instincts to Yah’s diary.”

The art, like the story, is occasional; this is a deeply narrative work, despite and because of the ways in which it disrupts its own narrative. Over the course of the book the art evolves from Panter’s “ratty line” into seriously ratty, then blunt as a Flair pen, but it may be misleading to call this evolution. These are obviously techniques that Panter has at his fingertips and deploys at will.  He’s absorbed lessons from Jack Kirby, Picasso, Duchamp, Pollock, Liechtenstein (ironically), Crumb, Spain Rodriguez, Cal Schenkel, Jack Chick, Ed Roth, Victor Moscoso, Rick Griffin (and dozens of other influences, I’m sure, that I can’t detect).

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At the start of second series, twelve Earth years later, there’s a new eagerness to pick up loose ends, as characters remind us what their plot threads have been in the first series. (The first lines of dialog in 2:1 are “Hand me that spanner, son.” ”Sure old-timer.” Then the old-timer dies.) But even the characters soon lose interest in themselves, roughly at 2:18, as the strip has other fish to fry. And these fish are strange and strangely familiar.

2:68 is the rare strip that makes straightforward narrative sense, because it’s not set in Dal Tokyo. (Or is it?) It’s titled “9-11-2001″ and it narrates the collapse of the Twin Towers as viewed (I presume) from Panter’s home in Brooklyn in a voice apparently Panter’s own. With one catch: the sequence reads right-to-left. This directionality, the correct one for reading Japanese — which almost seems logical for a strip appearing (in English) in a Japanese magazine — becomes the default, though not the rule, from now on when there is any narrative or rhetorical sequence.

But in general, somewhere around strip 2:46, all pretense of story collapses, or goes into hiding. Increasingly there’s no sequence in the text. There’s a series of images with some thematic consistency, sometimes even progression, which might read in either direction, but captions and dialog are dementedly unrelated, and the text is often appropriated. Several times the appropriations are credited, in 2:18 (Blake), 2:22 (John Gower), 2:93 (Swinburne) and 2:95 (Dryden).

Other times not. Consider the captions of 2:70:
“This is the iron age, wherein iniquity hath the upper hand.  O yes at size or sessions.”
“You scoure the ponde of a fewe croakyng Frogges, and leave behinde scorpians”
“They can make gold of goose grease. Such pernitious lawes.”
This is obscure Elizabethan prose; you can Google it. Most of it is from Robert Greene’s “Cuthbert Conny-catcher”, with one line from Thomas Nash. Nash and Greene were notorious satirists, friends of Kit Marlowe — that is, punks. They all died young. These lines satirize, first, the frauds that alchemists perpetrated, but also the society in which the alchemists were able to thrive. ”O yes at size and sessions” refers to the British courts, no better (like our own) than they should be.

It’s entirely unclear to me what Panter “means,” if anything, by this kind of superposition after “9-11-2001″, but the stew is rich enough to suggest that Consensus Narrative, like the American Empire that produces it, is again bankrupt. It points to, as Paul Fussell puts it in The Great War and Modern Memory, his study of a previous epochal rhetorical breaking point, “the inadequacy of language … to register what’s going on.”

I’d be personally interested to know where (and why) Panter gleaned these (and other) lines, but it doesn’t finally matter. “A pill millipede is virtually impenetrable for a predator,” is one of many fine sentences that I don’t think Panter composed, but I couldn’t source. As one goes deeper into the second series, there’s a gnomic quality to the writing, floating as independent from the illustrations as John Cage’s music was independent from Merce Cunningham’s dances.

I would tentatively suggest a particular narrative precursor to Panter: Raymond Roussel. Roussel (1877-1933) wrote deliriously unhinged books, which, like Panter’s, somehow cohere and delight. ”Impressions of Africa” from its title sounds like the travelogue Roussel could have written after his visit to northern Africa. Instead, it’s a surreal farrago about a completely fantastic sub-Saharan Africa, where Roussel never set foot (and the French title is a witty pun). His later book-length poem “New Impressions of Africa”, written entirely in conventional Alexandrine couplets (although with serpentine, deeply nested, parenthetic asides), included illustrations by one Henri Zo, which Roussel commissioned anonymously. Zo was not given the poem to work from; rather Roussel’s agent gave him a list of very specific descriptions, e.g., “A parrot on its perch seeming to talk to a passer-by. No other people.” After publication Zo wrote, “These are not the pictures I would have made if I had known I was illustrating Raymond Roussel!” But that’s exactly what Roussel wanted, and went to extremes to get: Zo’s pedestrian, workmanlike, baseline product. Roussel’s biographer Mark Ford comments, “the poignancy of the illustrations lies in their unawareness … of the ties that bind them to the rest of the poem.” A further “poignancy,” if that’s what to call it, is how Panter’s illustrations seem to preserve this same unawareness of his own text, while the text itself, like Roussel’s preoccupied with its own concerns, preserves a further unawareness from the various background stories it sometimes affords a glimpse of.

Roussel also wrote one novel that could be classified as “science fiction,” Locus Solus, in which the mad genius Canteral shows guests around his vast estate and demonstrates his inventions. What else is Panter doing?  Dal Tokyo is a planet-sized playhouse full of oddities that would give Paul Reubens pause. Any of the possible “stories” of this place is a feeble excuse for opening the cabinets of imagination and displaying their curiosities.

Panter is finally a hopeful guy. In 2: 91 a rectangular robot says, “What is that filmy noise and flimsy notion and foamy nothing?” It is conscience. From 2:105 on the strip reverts to story, in an attempt to end somewhere beyond crisis, in some back-door paradiso. ”It has been and remains our goal to heal a broken heart.” And the last line, after the giant women throw the men out of their “salvaged estate” is: “Where do you think he landed? He really flew! You do think he landed?” I do.

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Carter Scholz wrote regularly for The Comics Journal during the 1980s. He is the author of Radiance and The Amount to Carry.

One of the reasons why so-called objectivity is perhaps less important for Sacco is that he’s not on a breakneck news-cycle. He generally spends a great deal of time in an area when trying to find his story, which allows him more time to research, get the lay of the land, ask a lot of questions of a lot of people and build relationships. This is a big reason why Safe Area Gorazde and Footnotes In Gaza are masterpieces of both comics art and journalism. It’s also why the longer pieces in Journalism are the most interesting. ”The War Crimes Trials” (a coda to his work in Eastern Bosnia) and “Hebron: A Look Inside” (a job for Time magazine) are two of the weakest stories in the book. In the former, he lacked the kind of access he wanted in attempting to get across why the genocide trials of key Serbs were so important, which makes Sacco’s voice the loudest in a story where other voices need to be heard. This is a weakness that Sacco himself acknowledges in his notes. In the latter story, Sacco claims that he froze up when given a chance to work for Time, and the result was the sort of wishy-washy “balanced” story about Jewish settlers in Hebron that he generally avoids. He even removes himself from the story even as he leaves in his usual conversational narrative captions, giving it that air of objectivity that he also tries to avoid.

Much better is “The Underground War In Gaza”, rendered in his usual crisp black & white (the other two pieces are in color, which actually detract from their overall impact), a strip that in just four pages manages to capture the complexity of the situation where houses are being bulldozed because Israeli forces suspect they are complicit in housing contraband & terrorist tunnels. While the Israelis he interviews make a reasonable case, the bottom line is that the average Palestinian citizen repeatedly gets the short end of the stick. There is a chilling quote from an Israeli officer that wraps a ribbon around the themes of much of the book: “If I wanted to see an army without restraint, I should go to Chechnya.” This quote defended the actions of his military as comparatively “gentle,” essentially saying, “We may be killing some innocents and ruining lives, but at least we’re not sociopathic, genocidal killers and rapists.” This is obviously cold comfort and reflects an ethical code that is grossly out of whack, but is also a reflection of desperate times.

“Complacency Kills” is another slightly weak story, one that came when Sacco was embedded with a Marine unit. While that process by its nature tends to align journalists with their subjects, Sacco was well aware of that going in and wanted to examine “the tip of the imperial spear.” The story gets at the tensions and camaraderie of those Marines in Iraq as they try to do their job against insurgents while trying to remain sympathetic to Iraqi citizens. It’s the sort of story (minus flag-waving and easy appeals to emotion) that many have done in different formats, and Sacco acknowledges this while being grateful for the experience. “Trauma on Loan” is more interesting as a sort of journal of frustration for Sacco than as an actual piece of comics journalism; he tries to get details out of two Iraqi men who were abused for no reason by the U.S. military and who decided to sue Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. The two men, hanging out in New York and D.C. and sightseeing while trying to drum up publicity for their case, prove either too traumatized or are simply too tight-lipped to give Sacco anything beyond the basics, despite his painstaking attempts to win their trust.

Much more interesting is “Down! Up!”, a story about Sacco observing a group of Iraqis training under two American officers for the Iraqi National Guard. The title is a play on words, referring to the commands of a drill sergeant who makes the trainees do push-ups after one of their many mistakes, as well as a reference to George W. Bush’s stated desire for the ING to “stand up” so that “we can stand down.” Sacco paints an unflattering but fair picture of the instructors as bullies and tyrants trying to instill potentially life-saving training. The trainees are not especially well-educated or in great shape, and most volunteer to get a paycheck, despite the risk to their lives from insurgents. Sacco essentially gets across the sense that no matter which side these men choose, they are doomed, and he deftly weaves himself in and out of practices and private conversations to get the big picture.

Unsurprisingly, the three longest pieces are the best, giving Sacco room to talk to a lot of people and get a number of different viewpoints. “Chechen War, Chechen Women” is a history of the shocking violence perpetrated by the Russian government and their contract soldier in Chechnya, filtered through the point of view of IDPs–Internally Displaced Persons. These are families shattered by the conflict and taken to live in embarrassing, eyesore tent cities (which the Russians were desperate to get rid of) or converted factories. This hammers home a classic Sacco theme of the powerless being at the mercy of the powerful and finding little. Thanks to 9/11, the Russian government tried to paint this conflict as fighting terrorism, and to be sure, Chechen militants only served to pour gasoline on that particular fire. As always, it’s the women, children, and other innocents who suffer, not only from deprivation but from the mental anguish that results from such situations. Aesthetically, Sacco outdoes himself here, capturing the deeply wrinkled faces of the women he interviews, the detail of the squalid tents, the suffocating nature of the tiny rooms, and the bombed-out shell that is the Chechen capital of Grozny. With Sacco, it’s always been about the eyes. There’s a reason he never shows his own eyes and instead focuses on others–it’s a technique that allows the reader to feel like they’re looking the person in each panel straight in the eye. When that gaze is with a traumatized man driven to such lengths of insanity as to beat his own family because he didn’t recognize them, it’s especially unsettling.

“The Unwanted” is Sacco’s superb piece on the problems of immigration. He travels to his birthplace of Malta, the scene of an immigration laboratory on the verge of blowing up. Malta is a small island in the Mediterranean Sea that happens to be near enough to Sicily for African immigrants to sail there by mistake in overcrowded, barely seaworthy boats. Malta is ill-equipped to handle this kind of population influx, but it’s also clear that cultural and racial differences spur much of the mutual antipathy between the Maltese and the immigrants. Having grown up in Miami and seen with my own eyes the horrible treatment that Haitian immigrants often receive after barely escaping with their lives from the economic and political nightmare of that country, I felt a sense of déjà vu as Sacco described the Maltese policy of detaining immigrants in substandard conditions for long periods of time.

Sacco is extremely even-handed in this piece, hearing out the concerns of the Maltese even as they expose their own racism and paranoia. The essential paradox is that they are repulsed by many of the Africans because in their eyes they act like animals, without seeing the irony in how people tend to behave in the manner in which they are treated. Many of the Africans act like criminals because they are treated like criminals from the moment they step on the island. As one more sympathetic Maltese man says, it is their duty as a people to help out those in need: “We’re talking about people, not grass.” Sacco crucially provides context for the migration in telling the story of one man who fled from Eritrea in Eastern Africa, knowing the government was coming to jail him (or worse), simply for speaking out. The trek he describes in getting from Eritrea to Tripoli makes tales of Mexicans sneaking across the U.S. border look like a birthday party. All that trek earns him is a chance to get in that boat, with no one to navigate it.

Most of Sacco’s stories are bleak, but there’s often a small kernel of hope. Things might get better for the downtrodden, war might end, tyrants might fall, freedoms might increase. This doesn’t usually happen or guarantee happiness, but sometimes a new steady state emerges that doesn’t always produce misery. In Sacco’s last story in the book, “Kushinagar”, there is no hope, in part because the steady state is so thoroughly entrenched. Sacco visits a number of small villages in the titular region of India and spends time with Musahars, the lowest of the low in India’s caste system. While there is misery and squalor depicted in each of Sacco’s stories, this one details actual starvation and true deprivation. The Musahars cannot find employment in an increasingly mechanized system of agriculture. They cannot usually raise crops on their tiny plots of land, especially since they have to sell that land to pay off debts to banks they had to take out to pay off loan sharks to buy food on credit. The many government subsidy programs are hopelessly corrupt, with money and supplies going to village chiefs and siphoned off for the profit of higher caste members. Some Musahars described digging around in rat holes to get the grain that they steal in order to survive.

One journalist and weary advocate for the lower caste members, when asked about what will happen to the Musaharsin the future, resignedly says, “It appears obvious that all of them will be dead and they will be part of history.” That’s a devastating quote, but in a society that builds in such hard-wired differences and allows upper caste members to utterly ignore the law regarding lower caste members, it seems impossible to argue. The way Sacco structures the story is brilliant and serves to build up his case until we reach that one quote. He starts near the end, when the village chief and a gang of thuggish teenaged boys roust Sacco and his translator/guide out of the hut in which he is talking to the villagers. This is the end of the line, because the villagers know that any further trouble would only result in them being punished harshly by the hypocritical chief, who is obviously paranoid about them talking to a Western journalist. Sacco backs up and slowly lets the villagers talk about their conditions, the corruption they face and their total lack of a voice. Sacco then spends time with the fat-cat rajas who essentially get to treat the Musahars as slaves, when they even deign to employ them. It becomes obvious that this isn’t a case of a downtrodden people ready to rise up, but rather a populace that has internalized being downtrodden as their fate.

What makes things even worse is the willing blindness of the bureaucrats Sacco speaks to, who are full of solutions for the poor while looking the other way from the corruption that siphons off funds. Sacco leaves off Journalism with a story that’s more elegy than simple reportage, a mournful song for the doomed that dryly but pointedly excoriates all of those who could prevent this human tragedy but simply choose not to. It’s one of his finest moments as a journalist, a case where the subjectivity of his observations on a given day bears powerful fruit.

The collection is yet another sign that British cartoonists are not only establishing themselves as a force to be reckoned with in the alt-comics world, they’re interfacing directly with American artists as well. Indeed, the comic notes its “transatlantic” nature on its cover, and the mix of European and American artists is a seamless one. Back when it was still Whores of MENSA, one declared reason it included only women was to give female British cartoonists a place and space to publish on their own terms. If British alt-cartoonists were a rare breed a decade ago, then women in that category were even more scarce, and so the anthology had a practical consideration as well as an aesthetic one. Every issue was themed, and the first issue of The Strumpet doesn’t break that trend; it’s “the dress-up” issue, a concept the editors tie to transformation. Like some past publications that Lindner released, there’s some more zine-like content as well, including reviews and an interview with and prose piece by zinester (and TCJ.com contributor) Katie Haegele.

The comics content is quite strong, emphasizing a variety of visual and narrative approaches to the idea of dressing up. The first piece, by Kripa Joshi, is an attention-grabber because of the strong way that she spots blacks in her modern fairytale update. Patrice Aggs’ piece is its total opposite, with a fine line, naturalistic approach and a loud, bawdy tone in a story about a highly unconventional model at a photo shoot. Lisa Rosalie Eisenberg’s story takes yet another different turn, with a cartoony line and use of greyscale in a story about a man who dresses up like a cat in order to hang out with his own pets and literally go catting about town. Eisenberg stretches what would seem to be a thin premise as far as it will go but never lets it wear out its welcome. This is a nice one-two-three punch to open up an anthology, though the best stories are yet to come.

The entry that made me laugh out loud was Mardou’s “Mint Condition”, a story about a female cartoonist at a comics convention who swoons over smelly fanboys and secretly craves their attention like a romance comic heroine (and even notes that her outfit was inspired by a 1972 Gene Colan romance story). After she relishes a fanboy glancing at her cleavage, she laments, “Sheesh, I know I’m no Scarlet Witch, but do you have to look so unimpressed?” Lindner’s “Me and My Sari” is one of her delightful autobio stories that details how a sari (a traditional Indian garment) was made for her by one of her future relatives, and how wearing it at her wedding reception allowed her to actually dance and move freely. The story, told in Lindner’s breezy style and and with an eye toward her art’s more decorative qualities, touches on the ways that breaking out of her very white upbringing have opened up her life.

After Lindner’s story, which contains almost no negative space because of its decorative focus, Maartje Schalkx’s story about a Dutch nun who enclosed herself in a small room for devotional purposes is almost entirely negative space. The use of panels to demarcate time and action winds up being some of the dominant linework on each page until Schalkx gives a single close-up of the nun before she finally dies in her room, 57 years later. It’s a very clever exploration of line, space, and figure that is totally unlike anything else in the book. It’s followed by Jeremy Day’s ramshackle, casual and scribbly line that gives solidity to its figures with various patterns on clothes. It’s a fantasy story involving the creation of paper dolls for a group of poorly-dressed faeries who demand new outfits or else the protagonist will not be left alone to sleep. The narrative and figures lurch across the page with expressive, spontaneous lines that eventually resolve into an elegant solution.

The other noteworthy piece is Megan Kelso’s “The Good Witch”, a full-color comic on the back cover that covers familiar ground for her. Once again, Kelso elegantly uses text and image to tell two slightly different stories, as the text is from the point of view of two young girls and the images (of a mother dropping off her two young children at their grandmother’s house) tell a slightly different story. I loved Kelso characterizing the older woman as “timeless, like a fairy tale” and “a different species.” She captures that certain magic that children, if they are lucky, can feel with grandparents and other older relatives, a sense that an adult is actually in cahoots with them to have adventures. In many ways, it’s a sweeter take on childhood than I’ve seen in some of her past work, but there’s no question that she’s got the rhythms down pat.

Kelso’s and Schalkx’s stories are the best overall, but there are no weak links in this issue, even if a couple of the stories tread on similar story ideas. The story by Haegele is enormously evocative, the reviews are crisply written and everything about the design and format of this anthology is attractive and eye-catching. This is a great example of how Kickstarter can energize and improve a project in allowing higher production values and an increased page count. I hope that Lindner and Day can keep it going.

The root theme of all of Zettwoch’s comics has tended to be the tension between inventors and the increasingly impersonal advance of technology. This book opens with two huge images. First, we see a stylized and labeled version of a map of the territory designed to look like a postcard, which is the nearest thing the reader gets to a table of contents. Through the course of the book, Zettwoch methodically takes the reader around to virtually every point of interest on this map. Second, we see “Birdseye” (his real name is never revealed) surveying the ruins of a huge cell-phone tower after a rain storm. Zettwoch tells the reader right away that the reason for its collapse is unknown, but he provides clues. We are then taken back three months, when the construction of the tower is about to begin.

We see this small section of territory mostly through the eyes of his teenaged niece and nephew. The niece, Krystal, is an energetic go-getter who is fascinated by her uncle’s DIY philosophy, in which virtually everything is built out of bungee cords and empty three-liter bottles of soda. The nephew, a heavy-metal loving kid named Clint J. Murgatroyd, is interested in local monsters, conspiracy theories, and geodesic domes. Both find different ways of occupying themselves in an area with almost nothing to do, other than enjoying the spectacles of the tower being built and of the protesters whom it draws. Everyone loves drinking “red cows” (the recipe for which is of course included) and has affection for the gruff but generous old man.

In order to follow the narrative, the reader must constantly ask the question, “Why?” Why would Birdseye (who owns almost all of the land, as is revealed between the lines), a man who occupies the only house in the area, allow a company to build something that is essentially anathema to his way of doing things? In bits and pieces, Zettwoch helps the reader guess. That first map gives us the location of the old local church, as well as the adjacent site where a “mega-church” is being built. Judging from the fact that the slimy cell-phone company is having a meeting in the church and that the preacher is obviously grateful to Birdseye, it seems clear that part of his price was a donation to the church on the part of the company in order to expand it. Indeed, he exploits the tower to help virtually everyone in town, and the final thing he demands is that the tower have a giant cross-bar to make it look like a cross–what better way to advertise an emerging mega-church?

It’s telling, however, that in the fold-out (or fold-up, rather) diagram Zettwoch places in the middle of the book, the new tower (billed as the world’s “tallest man-made structure”) is compared to the Tower of Babel. There are also mentions of “freak electrical storms” that had skipped the region that summer (perhaps because of a local’s cloud-buster gun?), but the last panel of the book shows a storm brewing. While Birdseye quite notably takes no credit whatsoever for his involvement, there’s still a sense of hubris at work here, and that hubris is ultimately punished.

Zettwoch’s devotion to hand-made craftsmanship as a virtue certainly extends to the page. The book was obviously shot directly from his original art with little to no digital alteration. Indeed, one can see layers of Wite-Out splashed on top of his colored pencils with no attempts made to conceal it. Zettwoch’s figures have a blocky, cartoony quality that fits in with his tendency to continually remind readers that they are looking at drawings, and hand-made drawings at that. It’s not so much that Zettwoch fetishizes the hand-made quality of his art, but rather that it seems to be the only way he’s comfortable doing it. If you commission Zettwoch for an illustration, it’s not because you want something slick, but because you want something that has the can get across a complex, technical idea in a manner that is warm and welcoming to a reader. Zettwoch is clearly interested in the relationship between sign and signifier in this book, as both Krystal and Clint are obsessed with labels versus function, the ways in which labels carry mixed messages, and in how adults tend to tune out the symbolic power of things like corporate logos.

Again, all of these ideas are under the surface. The book can be read as a breezy romp through the sort of rural Midwestern environment that Zettwoch loves to explore. It can be seen as one of his diagram stories writ extremely large. The way I see it, however, is that’s a commentary on what can happen when one abandons something that works, a way of life that’s viable, for something slick and garish. It’s telling that the story is set in the late ’90s, right before the huge cell-phone boom. Zettwoch emphasizes the ways in which his protagonists have to engage each other in person, something that is removed in a cell-phone-heavy culture. I’m not saying that Zettwoch is explicitly anti-technology, but rather that this book wants the reader to stop and think what is gained and what is lost by building that tower.

My quietness has a man in it, he is transparent 

The cartoonist Gabrielle Bell is what might have happened if Emily Dickinson had ever gotten out of the house. In her graphic memoir The Voyeurs, Bell—a recluse even in a crowd—studies different kinds of loneliness with the sort of singular interest that most people reserve for more pleasant tasks, like sampling wedding cakes. Grounded by a self-deprecating sense of humor, she has a gift for exploring the fullness of silence that shares its DNA with Dickinson’s dashes. There’s a coy sort of melancholy in its restraint, but it’s buoyed by the great faith it must require to trust the reader to fill in those pauses just so.

In Bell’s hands, comics are poetry’s cool little cousin, all slippery meanings, feats of peculiar punctuation, and the unfortunate tendency to namedrop the likes of Bertolt Brecht. She avoids the threat of pretension that’s implicit in all of those things with well-timed flashes of humor and a vague distaste for anything she can’t do on the Internet. She’s never mean or insincere or trying too hard; she just is in a way that’s both refreshing and a little autistic.

Above all, The Voyeurs is a master class in pacing. Bell’s use of panels in particular gives even her most straightforward stories an additional register of beats and pauses that words and images on their own can’t achieve. Her slightly wobbly grids offer a soothing sort of sameness that occasionally ends on a long silent beat, leaving both Bell and the reader to mediate on the landscape.

The trick is she’s thoughtful without being moody. Bell’s work has a transcendent quality that stands out in the chaotic milieu that is autobiographical comics, achieving a clarity of tone that is deceptive in its simplicity. Is that what life feels like when you do a lot of yoga? I myself am into zumba, which is telling.

Like Frank O’Hara, Bell’s home is New York City, and a lot of her stories take place while she’s walking around. She ignores the more flashy aspects of the weirdness of that place in favor of its subtle surreal qualities, which she teases out expertly from otherwise banal afternoons. While her stories are almost entirely autobiographical, there’s a certain fluidity between fantasy and reality that marks the way she takes in the world. It’s a defense mechanism, perhaps, but it’s totally charming.

Appropriately, Bell’s reality seems most tenuous when she’s traveling abroad with her (now ex-) boyfriend, the director Michel Gondry. Away from home, she keeps to herself, asleep for long stretches like a lady in a fairytale. In Tokyo, she withdraws from a media whirlwind by fixating on a bowl of pretty candies. In France, Gondry jokes that he couldn’t tolerate her if she weren’t so talented—which is also, as it happens, his blurb for the book. Life that imitates art that imitates life? In a word: whoa.

The Voyeurs is a heavily edited version of Bell’s web comic, Lucky, the Internet diary that she’s maintained for many years. The demands of that format inform the book’s meta thread, wherein the cartoonist reflects on the ways in which her art intersects with her life. (One gets the sense that Bell might never leave her apartment again if she ever decides to traffic in fiction.) These episodes, as well as her niggling sadness, sometimes make her seem like a ghost who’s haunting her own life. The self as a voyeur—someone who likes to watch—is a take on postmodern detachment (and more narrowly, what it means to be a writer) that strikes me as thoroughly correct; in any case, it’s one way to articulate the increasingly palpable strangeness of contemporary life, where even flesh and blood can feel like an avatar. As Bell’s body moves around in the world, her spirit is at home, drawing comics.

It’s fitting, I think, that the introduction to The Voyeurs was written by the punk icon Aaron Cometbus. As a kid, his zine helped me see that there was a wide world beyond the confines of my own Tennessee cowtown in a way that made me feel hopeful about my life. Now, as an adult with mobility, I see the real difficulty is in pushing past the limits of a more interior landscape. In that task, I’m glad to have Bell as a guide. You could say The Voyeurs is the work of a writer’s writer, but it’s actually something more cool, more exotic, more punk: a rare glimpse of the fiercely mysterious human heart, observed in its natural habitat.

Trubble Club #5 is the Sistine Chapel of jam comics. This twelve-page broadsheet is designed to look like a standard newspaper’s Sunday comics section, and it took 28 artists two years to painstakingly create the internally consistent, extremely dark strips it contains. The Chicago comics collective in question consists of some heavy hitters as well as several lesser-known cartoonists, and no credits on individual strips are given to reflect who worked on what. Frankly, given the panel-to-panel changes in each jam strip, doing these kinds of credits might have been impossible. Still, careful attention allows the reader to detect the hand of especially distinctive artists, particularly their lettering.

For the record, Trubble Club consists of Nate Beaty, Grant Reynolds, Laura Park, Jeremy Tinder, Aaron Renier, Edie Fake, Rachel Niffenegger, Bernie McGovern, Lilli Carré, Corinne Mucha, Jeffrey Brown, Lucy Knisley, Becca Taylor, Jose Garibaldi, Joshua Cotter, Joe Tallarico, Onsmith, Lyra Hill, Sam Sharpe, and Carie Vinarsky. The guests for this issue included Ezra Clayton Daniels, Craig Thompson, Thorne Brandt, Erika Moen, Antoine Dode, and Alec Longstreth. It’s easy to pick out Carré and Park in particular, but playing spot-the-artist isn’t a game intended by the artists of this broadsheet, unlike it was in the famous Zap jam comics. The intent here is a wholesale subversion of the familiar comics page, using the tropes of familiar cartoons in the nastiest of ways.

The strips here fall roughly into three categories: direct parodies featuring familiar characters, stylistic parodies that mimic the tropes of familiar strips, and strips that don’t have a specific match but subvert the Sunday pages with violence, grossness, or sheer darkness. An example of the former is “Heathfield”, a strip about a gigantic, floating orange cat which features J. Wellington Wimpy cutting the throat of Ziggy. The humor behind this kind of strip is pretty easy and obvious and not especially startling. An example of the second kind of strip is “Stretch Marks”, a brutal parody of Baby Blues that features its mother character having a brain aneurysm and lying in a pool of her own blood, as she imagines getting a prize for a product called “Blood-bath-be-gone.” From the dark set-up to the tremendous punchline, this strip really nails the spirit of this product.

Most of the strips that emphasize murder and mayhem are pretty straightforward, even as each jam artist tries to advance the narrative. “Lyle Carr, Model Train Conductor” features its train-enthusiast title character constantly blurting out “Chugga chugga chugga” as he murders women, only to meet his match in a woman who stabs him, whereupon a smaller version of himself pops out to menace her with an axe. It’s a bit of silliness whose violence doesn’t resonate, unlike “Misery Loves Stefanie” (about a masochistic goth kid with a crush on a sadistic teenager), “Methyl” (about a drug addict mom who does terrible things to her baby), “Peach Fuzz” (an adventure strip starring toddlers who have to battle a foe with SIDS vision and the dreaded Cradle Robber), and “The Horror, The Horror” (another adventure strip with a talking dog that features a penis-chomping zombie girl).

This is a taboo-smashing, envelope-pushing kind of comic, featuring pedophilia, murder, bestiality, gore, ritual sacrifice, and a poor boy whose pituitary and prostate glands are in opposite places (leading to “leaks” from his head), causing his vagina-foreheaded teacher to demand he stay after class. My two favorite strips in the book, however, offer differing takes on more modern strips. “Digi-Dad” is about a father who witnesses a brutal police attack, and reports what he’s seen on Twitter, only to get accused of “douchebaggery” by a random internet asshole. After going to heaven, wherein he has access to the cosmic Google’s safe-search and turns it off, he causes everyone on earth to get freaky (including at his own funeral), leading his son to tweet, “My dead dad is awesome.”  Still, the best and darkest strip in the book is “Joint Custody”, a pastiche of continuity family strips like For Better Or For Worse. Drawn with no attempt at a punchline whatsoever, the strip follows a dad kicked out of his house by his wife (whose frowning dog is in total solidarity with her) and his visit with his two young children. The four-way split panel where the dad and the two kids are crying out exaggerated beads of sweat/tears and the mom & dog are expelling the same as tears of laughter is a devastating, awesomely funny image. I wish I knew who drew that one in particular (Onsmith?), because it’s so effective. The final two panels consist simply of the brother (wearing too-tight Spider-Man pajamas) going to his sister’s room at night and crying to her that he wishes mom and dad would get back together.

While not every strip is in that same category of dark, conceptually brilliant humor, every one is at least worth looking at. That’s not something that’s generally true of most jam projects, nor is it true of the wave of broadsheet comics that have been published over the last couple of years. Trubble Club #5 takes advantage of its format, acknowledging and parodying its past as a way of making the format part of its devastating, nasty and pitch-black sense of humor. As an anthology of like-minded artists, it’s definitely one where the ego of the artist is subdued in favor of the overall project itself, which marks it as a unique sort of art object. Unlike most jam projects (which are usually quick-and-dirty excuses to publish something), this one obviously was important to its participants and that showed in the level of craft and care shown in every panel.

The story of Keller and Sullivan is one that’s been greatly celebrated in a variety of media, from books to stage to film. It’s a compelling story, given the narrative of the young and partly blind teacher finding a way to teach Keller how to communicate and bring her out of darkness. What’s interesting is that Lambert delves into the story behind the story, which includes Sullivan’s former teacher at the Perkins Institution for the Blind exaggerating Keller’s accomplishments in part to raise money for the school. Lambert goes out of his way to strip his narrative of romanticism without sacrificing an ounce of its true emotional power. At the same time, he makes every page a visual feast without showboating or adding extraneous flourishes.

Lambert neatly ties together the narratives of several characters. First, there’s Keller herself, who gains greater agency as she learns to communicate and then develops an unquenchable desire to learn about her world. What she thinks and perceives comes into question at the end of the book as the narratives come to a head. Sullivan’s fierce temper is driven by a childhood spent living in a brutal poorhouse with no education and a constant need to prove herself. Her pride and her temper are frequently powerful allies in her triumph over her circumstances, but they also hinder her in significant ways. Keller’s parents have their own simpler narrative, with her long-suffering mother giving Sullivan advice and a warning that prove to be effective and her father representing the intractable Old South (the Kellers lived in Alabama) and sexism. Finally, Sullivan’s teacher Michael Anagnos is the other key figure in the book; his interest in Sullivan’s potential and patience with her disdain for all authority helped shape her into a great teacher, but his treating her like a daughter wound up leaving him vulnerable to betrayal.

That’s a lot of ground to cover in just a hundred pages, but Lambert gets around that by employing a tight 4 x 4 grid on nearly every page. He collapses a couple of panels on some pages as a point of emphasis and goes to even larger panels when something emotionally and narratively powerful occurs, as when Helen is able to spell out “water” for the first time. Given the tiny panels he employs, Lambert keeps his figures simple and uses a thin and delicate line. Drifting toward a more cartoony style allows him to use all sorts of cartooning shortcuts, from dark squiggles over a character’s head indicating anger to a scribbly line on a face indicating rage. Lambert relies greatly on body language and gesture to communicate emotion, like the way Sullivan’s back stoops when she’s furious and the way her face screws up when she cries for the first time in school. Lambert’s other secret storytelling weapon is his use of color. Eschewing backgrounds in many panels is a choice he made for the clarity of his storytelling, but he is unerring in the selection of colors he chooses to fill out those panels. The beauty of nature is a running visual trope in the book as Helen tries to imagine what it’s like, but Lambert’s lovely palette is incredibly evocative as the reader tries to imagine what her home is like.

Of course, the reader is immediately confronted by Helen’s point of view as the story begins: darkness punctuated by Keller’s blue, blurry conception of herself and her environment, interrupted by a pair of arms forcing her to use a spoon to eat. We see that blurry figure flee after the third page of this struggle, and then we are introduced to the other characters in the book in Lambert’s normal style. It’s an exciting way to begin the book and a clever method by which to educate the reader as to what it was like for Keller. The way Lambert slowly changes Keller’s self-image is fascinating. First she associates the letters in hand signals with objects, before she makes her breakthrough and understands what “water” is. At that point, we see Helen “seeing” water as an object and a word on the page. It reminds me a bit of what Dash Shaw did when minds got tangled up in Bodyworld. Lambert goes big in the panels where Keller’s world opens up as she pats everything in the hall and demands to know what things are called. It’s a use of language that is visual in her own mind’s eye, even as she can’t see. There’s a fantastic sequence in the book where Helen and Annie are sitting under a tree, and Helen starts imagining foxes, dogs, and pigs cavorting about in the water and climbing up a tree. Her relentless thirst to understand her environment allows her to imagine what might happen in it.

That leads to a controversy where a short story she wrote for Anagnos as a birthday present is later shown to be a near-copy of a previously published work. Though Sullivan claims that she never read the story to Helen and Helen claims it “came from my mind [...] from Helen,” the controversy proved damaging to Anagnos, the school, and Sullivan. The real tragedy, which Lambert discusses in his endnotes, is that Helen found herself unable to trust her own thoughts as her own and as a result never wrote fiction again. He deals with that issue subtly as the book ends, as Annie helps Helen understand why she suddenly feels hot and then cool while riding in a carriage.

While the book is driven by its dialogue, Lambert packs each page with background eye pops and subtle visual cues. For example, Helen’s self-image subtly changes as time goes on, acquiring a mouth and eyes. When she’s being interrogated as to her potential plagiarism, her self-image starts to regress. Lambert also uses background details for laughs, like a page where Sullivan winds up in mud as Helen relentlessly asks her about where babies come from. Lambert has always possessed that sort of flourish as part of his visual storytelling vocabulary, to the point that some of his comics were more flourish than actual story. In this case, all of his visual pyrotechnics were used in service of the story and in fact proved crucial in telling the story. One could see this coming from Lambert given the increasing narrative complexity and ambiguity of some of his recent comics, but he takes that to another level by making this assignment his own while obviously scrupulously researching it and breathing new life into a familiar story.

using

the six-panel format

to break up visual and verbal observations

in ways

that make them feel more profound

than they really are.

These are both common diary-comic pitfalls, and Yanow falls into the latter in particular with some regularity.

But she’s not trapped in either, and that’s the exciting thing about In Situ. It starts with her line, which is sloppy in the best way, able to shift between Porcellino minimalism, frantic impassioned mark-making, sketchbook casualness, and (yes) sometimes just plain looking sloppy with startling ease. This enables her to bounce immediately from the slow slice-of-life stuff mentioned above to, well, pretty much anything else—abstraction, life studies, figures conveyed through the pure interaction of shapes Andy Burkholder-style, even strips that have no visual element at all besides hand-drawn panel borders and dialogue dotted with Anders Nilsen-y crossouts and redactions.

It makes every page turn an adventure. There’s a strip right at the beginning that sketches out an afternoon with an interesting “she” in three snapshot panels, with no context of who “she” is relative to Yanow herself. There are strips about the Occupy movement that echo its Oakland manifestation’s emphasis on reclaiming abandoned spaces by leaving their panels mostly empty. There’s a screentone-heavy trip to a “The Queer Bar,” drawn in a tighter, more confident line, popping the whole night out against the background of the rest of the strips. There’s an adaptation of another writer’s work boiled down to how spotted blacks can convey an ocean at night and the black jacket of someone standing on the beach. There are a pair of strips drawn in a slightly more naturalistic style that simply involve Yanow walking off the street and into a building.

So that’s why I say this diary comic is more like life, more lifelike, than most. There’s some tedium, and there’s some overwrought relationshippy/arty drama, but life is a restless thing, prone to coughing up wow and what-the-fuck moments amid the dull grey hum, and Yanow is clearly a restless and game enough artist to take a crack at capturing them, changing her art in whatever way it takes to do it on a case by case basis. You have to figure that the more she tries, the more she’ll succeed.

NonNonBa is a fairly unusual collision of genres: (semi-)autobiography through ghost story. The tension between these two aspects is present even in the three-page prologue, which introduce us to the bellicose boys of Shigeru Mizuki’s youth, boys waging war on each other with sticks and rocks for small bits of territory in their town, boys swept up in the nationalism and insecurity of Japan in the early 1930s. Our viewpoint swiftly moves from this tumult to the artist at work, to the boy crouching over his desk at night, singing to himself, and imagining on paper the “hundred thousand worlds” he knows are right beyond the veil of this one, butting right up against the edges. And then, on the fourth and fifth pages of book, a double page spread of an image that won’t recur for several hundred pages: two children and their elderly friend in a boat, looking on in shock at a sky full of great balls of scattering light. “The night Miwa was going to be sold her dead mother came to her—beautiful globes of glimmering light to see her off. There is something out there even if we can’t see it…”

Mizuki’s comics have so far been represented in English by a single release, 2011′s Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths, which shares NonNonBa‘s status as fictionalized (with a “kinda-sorta” thrown in) memoir. But while OTOND focuses on Mizuki’s war experiences, NonNonBa is centered on Mizuki’s youthful experiences with the yōkai, Japanese ghosts. Mizuki is best known in Japan for his comics connected to the yōkai, mostly the long-running GeGeGe no Kitaro. So for contemporaneous Japanese readers NonNonBa would have served as an origin of sorts, insight into the background of an artist with a life-long interest in folklore of the supernatural. You might think that a memoir of the supernatural would present credibility problems for a reader not sharing the belief system of the author. But Mizuki is a cagey narrator and a massively skilled cartoonist, who understands better than most the ways in which a drawing can function as both a symbol of a thing and the literal thing itself. And so a reader such as myself, religiously skeptical of any claims for the supernatural, is still capable of reading these events as literal (semi)fact, and decoding them as the results of an incredibly imaginative young man with influences in his life that persuade him to view the world through the lens of the mysterious. This is no mean trick for a comic that literally depicts various ghosts and monsters on the page as active agents in the story.

The biggest influence in the young boy’s life is the title character of the book, “Grandma” NonNon, an elderly neighbor whose matter-of-fact discussion of the occult alternately fascinates and terrifies young Shige and his brother. Throughout the episodic structure of the book NonNonBa is there to help Shige navigate not only the supernatural world, but also trying encounters with isolation, loneliness, jealousy, and even death.

Shige’s parents are drawn much more broadly than the nuanced NonNonBa. Shige’s mother in particular has one harsh, shrill note through the early portions of the book, not dissimilar to supporting characters in Dickens’s books, there to provide color rather than a nuanced portrait of a human being. It’s significant that when she does change, that change is a shift towards modernity, and an opening culture: embracing her husband’s dream of bringing culture to their small town via the cinema he has opened. Although the clash of the old and the new is never the up-front conflict in the book, this changing culture that acts as the back drop for the book, allowing the yōkai themselves representing at various times the mysteries of the natural world, the irrationality of nature, and the older culture of Japan itself.

The high-relief contrast between caricatured figures and photo-referenced and lavishly rendered backgrounds of OTOND is exploited in NonNonBa, to clearer thematic effect. Mizuki’s flexible figures, rendered with supple tapered lines, resemble radishes or monsters as much as people. This they have in common with the yōkai, which are alternately grotesque and fantastic, but always seem alive and moving and real. The backgrounds, doubtlessly rendered by an army of nameless assistants, never collapse into the cold impersonality that typifies much similar work, but are instead lush and lovely, and seem all the more appropriate for a book with a setting that no longer exists in the world.

If only the same could be said for the adaptation. It’s a shame for a book so visually lush to be saddled with a single font for every sound effect in the book, a font that reveals awkwardness and digital artifacts at its largest sizes and deadens the visual impact. The translation is thankfully free of the anachronisms, errors, and confusion present in OTOND. But it also lacks the fluidity of prose that one might hope for in an exceptional translation—in short, good writing. More basic failures, including little historical context or info on prior publication, and awkward digital lettering that fails to conform to the shape of word balloons, suggest a lack of attention to detail.

Fortunately, the art reproduction is beautiful, as is the (uncredited) design work. And the book itself manages to be both strange and grand, and in the right moments somehow understated. The closing sequence especially would present opportunities for theatrical enlargement, but Mizuki wisely avoids this temptation and lets his story straddle that far more interesting line between the flamboyantly supernatural and the quietly human.

As the book opens in 1909, the girls are six and only just beginning to learn about the world surrounding them. Their parents are the typical infallible figures a child of that age perceives: their father is warm and kind, full of rich stories, while their mother is hard and cruel, yet demands respect. Her insistence on bringing the girls up in a non-goyish way seems almost romantic at first as she tries to keep ethnic traditions alive, but as the girls get older it becomes obvious that her virtue and motives are greatly in doubt. The book opens with Fanya observing a woman bleed out after attempting to give herself an abortion, leading her to meet the “lady-doctor” Bronia. She’s an OB/GYN who also secretly performs abortions on the side. Meanwhile, Esther drops off a package of clothing for a customer of her mother’s fabric store, only to be introduced to a burlesque house and brothel. Those two events shape their lives in frequently distressing and unexpected ways, as Corman relentlessly subverts expectations throughout the narrative.

Corman’s attention to period detail and the quirks of Yiddish bring this book to vivid life. She captures the clangor of a typical busy street (especially in how a child perceives it), the claustrophobic nature of city living, and the mix of excitement and danger potentially lurking around every corner. Her figures bear a stylish simplicity, but Corman also excels at drawing ugly and grotesque figures as well. Her style is realistic but slightly rubbery, allowing for expressionist flourishes. She draws the hair of certain characters not so much with ink as with smeared scribbles, so as to represent a tangled bird’s nest quality. She doesn’t draw sexy characters but rather characters who are frankly sexual. Ever since her first book, Queen’s Day, Corman’s pages have always emphasized spotting blacks, and the most attractive pages in this book continue that tendency. Like the New York she draws and the characters she develops, her art is both beautiful and ugly.

As the story unfolds, Fanya learns how to read (in defiance of her mother) and works for Bronia, while Esther deceives her mother by getting a job at the burlesque theater doing odd jobs. Fanya remains the “good daughter” even if she doesn’t bring in any money, while Esther is eventually shunned by her mother for becoming a dancer and later a prostitute. Their father dies a broken man even as we learn that Minna not only slept with every man and boy on the block, but that she had been doing such things her whole life. Corman has a complex take on this character, condemning her not so much for expressing her sexuality but for the way she treats her husband and hypocritically shuns her daughter for supposedly “shaming” the family, heartlessly excluding her when the youngest daughter in the family dies. Indeed, Minna’s whole marriage is a sham, as an extended flashback to Russia reveals. We see Isaac dodging Russian killers and meeting a woman he falls in love with before he’s offered safe passage to America if and only if he marries Minna, who is shaming her family by being promiscuous.

In this indifferently hostile world, some would say that there’s no such thing as good or evil–just life or death. However one is able to survive, Corman asserts that one still has the choice to be cruel or kind. Isaac certainly does not deserve the fate he receives, but Corman implies that he is better off living on his wits in Europe than living a lie in America; it’s undeniably true that the marriage to Minna may have saved his life in the short term, but it led to other sacrifices in the long term. Fanya defies her mentor by disseminating information, handing out condoms and generally saving the lives of women Bronia does not approve of, but her own inability to balance her feelings against her sex drive winds up being her downfall. Even as she accuses Bronia of being a hypocrite for the selective nature of whom she deigns to treat, Fanya’s own hypocrisy has tragic circumstances.

At the same time, Esther survives and later thrives by not denying who she is. In a world where life and death at the hands of brutal johns requires a razor-sharp understanding of self, she was forced to either evolve or die. Her ability to negotiate the hatred of the fellow women in the brothel and defend herself when needed put her in a position to accept the charity of another character who is true to himself. Meyer Birnbaum is a punk kid that Isaac manages to save from a number of scrapes in Russia; as a kid, he just didn’t know when to shut up, even when his life was in danger. We meet him in a flashback, but he reappears later to watch Esther perform and then later becomes a john. There’s a certain randomness to why Birnbaum makes it and Isaac doesn’t, but Birnbaum’s frank honesty is what allows him to thrive in New York City.

Even as Esther manages to get a wealthy New York businessman as a benefactor and lives in a posh penthouse, it’s obvious that she doesn’t forget her roots. She uses her wealth and influence to both achieve her dreams of becoming an actress but also helps out the madame who gave her her start as well as her sister. “You’re not the only do-gooder in New York,” Esther tells Fanya when they’re reunited. It’s a sign that however hardened she has to become in order to survive, the city is unable to claim her essential humanity, a humanity that was created and nurtured in the relationship she had with her sister as a young girl as well as the kindness their father always showed them. While Corman allows for a lot of moral ambiguity in the conventional sense, there seems to be no question which characters are the most humane. The complex route she takes to guide the reader to arrive at these conclusions, the level of detail she includes, and the feelings that the journey evinces are what make this a successful work.