by Austin English

I Lived in Alaska
Corrine Mucha

This is an excellent minicomic. It's filled with short stories about preparing to visit Alaska, visiting it, and returning from the visit. Mucha has a great little style: very minimalist, but not crude at all. Mucha loves drawing and it shows. There is a spontaneous quality that her work has that's really a thrill to witness. Where is that line gonna go? Where's it gonna end? I like following Mucha's lines a lot. Her contours are well done and there is one drawing in particular of her and her boyfriend falling asleep head to head that's a sort-of-perfect illustration. As sparse as Mucha's drawings are, there's ample movement and expression.

Mucha is also great at drawing tones. She handles cross-hatching and negative space with skillfull contrast. One page has a somewhat-interesting drawing of a hillside, and Mucha's character remarks "beautiful, isn't it?" to which her boyfriend responds "kinda showy." In the next panel, Mucha draws a beautiful cross-hatched sky with a negative-space hillside/cloud. Her boyfriend concludes "now that's beautiful." And it is. This sequence really showcases I Lived in Alaska's poetry. It forcefully communicates how it probably felt to view that landscape, and how it felt to define that landscape in particular as unique. I certainly felt it.

I Lived in Alaska is full of great cartoon poetry like this, and I want to see more of Mucha's comics. The subject of this work -- moving, returning -- is epic, but it still feels slight. I think it's supposed to feel slight, given the micro-short story quality of it. I'd be very interested in seeing Mucha do something longer and stranger. And since she's so good at different tones, I wished that more panels has the type of contrast that a small portion of the book had. Most of I Lived in Alaska is composed of line drawings. Mucha could produce an entire comic with tone contrasts if she wanted to. That would certainly be something.

For now, you can contact Corrine about buying this comic (and others) at www.maidenhousefly.com. Her work is also available at the U.S.S. Catastrophe store.

Brush and Pen
Shannon Smith

This comic has characters who are ballpoint pens, characters who are Sharpies and characters who are brushes. Each character is drawn with that particular tool. It's an interesting idea, but a frustrating one. Smith draws pretty well in brush, but not so well in ballpoint pen or Sharpie. The potential for an idea like this one lies in how interesting style contrasts would happen with different mediums, but that doesn't really happen here. You get very nice brush drawings, and really mediocre ballpoint pen drawings that dilute the brushwork.

But there is an artist in Smith. The brush drawings feature interesting expressions and figure movement. I want to see Smith do more comics in brush, and fewer panels where two characters sit stiffly and look at each other blankly with no backgrounds to distract us from the same stiff arrangement, panel after panel. Smith knows how to make an interesting facial composition. The next task is to make an interesting panel composition.

More info at www.shannonsmith.net.

Austin English is a cartoonist living in New York. His new book, Space, can be found at better comics shops.

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