The Best American Comics 2009: Let the yearly bitching ritual (bitchual?) begin

Some links: The latest issue of MySpace Dark Horse Presents appears to be kid-targeted, or at least "all ages". It's especially notable for this excellent Andi Watson strip, but Scott Morse has a cute one too.

Here's what appears to be a good source of writing-about-comics: Sequential Pulp, a Canadian print magazine that's also available in PDF form.  I don't know how user-friendly that format is, but it looks like it's got some good contents.  Worth checking out, I'd say.

The Best American Comics 2009
Edited by Charles Burns
Series Editors: Jessica Abel and Matt Madden

This may be obvious by this point, but the title of this series is something of a misnomer.  Rather than being a collection of the best comics which came out in 2009, it's actually the volume of the series that came out in that year, with the actual window of eligibility being between September 2007 and August 2008.  That makes for an oddly backward-looking focus for what seems at first glance to be an up-to-date book.  That's the nature of the beast though, with this being an entry in publisher Houghton Mifflin's line of annual thematic collections.  What's even funnier though, is that the "best" part of the title isn't really true either.  Sure, one would say that's all subjective anyway, but even the preface by series editors Jessica Abel and Matt Madden describes the volume as not the "best" comics, but "a personally curated selection of top-notch work that reflects just some of the excellence and variety that exists out there".  That's all well and good, but the title still says "best", so I think it's fair to judge whether the work chosen really deserves to be placed on this pedestal, and as with every entry in this series, there are some selections that really do not deserve that honor. For one thing, the line about variety is contradicted in guest editor Charles Burns' introduction, when he states that twenty of the thirty-six pieces in this book are by creators who have had their work published in previous volumes of the series.  The breadth and depth of the work being produced in the comics field these days should minimize these repeat honorees, but that doesn't seem to be the case; instead, a few recognizable names get honored again and again, with quality comics being passed over.  But, to reiterate, that's also the nature of the beast; familiarity apparently doesn't breed contempt in the world of comics.

Anyway, as I've done in previous years, I think it's an interesting exercise (for me at least' others may just find it tiresome) to look at each entry and determine whether it really is one of the best comics of the year (or, to hew to the editors' caveats, a work that deserves to be spotlighted as an outstanding and significant work).  Engage!

"Shh!", "Ringtones", "The Argument", and "Hope Gropius"
By Tim Hensley

These short strips from Hensley's Wally Gropius series are scattered throughout the volume, with the first and longest one kicking things off.  The series is a satire of Archie-style teen comics, using an interesting mix of cartoony art that resembles old-school animation and bits of modern society and technology.  But it's weirder than that, with an odd rhythm that sees characters bounce around panels while spouting flowery,  non-sequitur-filled language, making little sense but conveying an unsettling feeling of anarchy, and often engaging is rather unsettling acts of sex and violence.  There are plenty of background (and foreground) gags, with an especially notable one seeing a fantasy of Wally's girlfriend Jillian singing the national anthem at a sports game while dressed as an Abu Ghraib prisoner:

It's strange stuff, but it's certainly fascinating, and when the book collecting the series is released, it should be a mind-bending experience.

Is it really one of the best comics of the year?  Yes; this is exactly the sort of thing that should be collected in this series.

"Justin M. Damiano"
By Daniel Clowes

This short comic was a piece Clowes contributed to the Zadie Smith-edited anthology The Book of Other People, which collected stories about characters invented by the authors (i.e. "fiction"), and while at first glance, it seems to be another example of Clowes depicting a hateful hipster asshole, it ends up being a rather fascinating portrayal of its title character, a film critic who doesn't seem to like anything.  He attends a press screening and junket for an independent film that he seems to hate, but when the director is informed of a piece that he wrote several years ago (when he was "young and stupid" as he says) praising the filmmaker as "the one great director of the nineties", he gets invited to actually interview him.  Another critic presses him to ask about a scene from another of the director's movies that he hated, and it turns out that it was completely different than Damiano had interpreted, with a meaning that was altered due to studio-enforced edits, a change that devastated the director.  This really seems to make Damiano stop and think, and reconsider that the hardened shell of cynicism he has grown, although, this being Clowes, he doesn't exactly make any dramatic life-changing decisions.  It's a nice bit of character exploration, with Clowes' usual fine art that makes talking heads and internal narration captions interesting and full of subdued expression.  Very nice.

Is it really one of the best comics of the year?  Yes, and not just because Clowes is one of the "stars" that always gets chosen for this series.

"Paul Revere and John Singleton-Copley in 'Artist Vs. Artisan'"

By Peter Bagge

This is one of the "Founding Fathers Funnies" strips that Bagge included in his Apocalypse Nerd series (and probably elsewhere), looking at some of those people who have been so celebrated by history that we don't really view them as people.  That's what makes them interesting; Bagge takes these recognizable names and treats them as real individuals, making for fascinating portraits that are still based in reality.  In this case, silversmith/political cartoonist/amateur dentist Revere meets with portrait painter Singleton-Copley, and they discuss their differing approaches to their work, whether they are artists or just tradesmen, and the revolutionary politics of the day.  It's an interesting conversation, and one that demonstrates the complexity of life in any era of history.  Plus, it's quite funny, full of Bagge's expressive, loose-limbed cartooning.  An entire book of these strips by Bagge would certainly be good reading.

Is it really one of the best comics of the year?  Yes.  Wow, three for three so far!

Strips from Underworld

By Kaz

Unless I'm mistaken, every volume of this series has contained selections from Kaz's alternative weekly strip, and they are all the goddamn same.  As amusing as they are, every strip sees low-class cartoon characters inhabit a filthy environment and make some statement about the pathetic nature of their lives.  The art is fine, with lots of grimy detail and a bunch of cartoony grotesquerie, but they don't say anything interesting, they don't demonstrate excellent storytelling, and they aren't showing any artistic growth.  Outside of Kaz being a respected cartoonist, it's hard to see why anyone would consider these strips to be so amazing; one starts to examine strips for deeper meaning, like this entry:

Is it meant to be a statement about the modest nature of its characters' desires (and thus, the simple desires of impoverished societal outcasts)?  Is the specific detail of the "after" image (the stacked cars, the graffiti, the barren, plantless ground, the nearby power lines) meant to evoke a sort of suburban poverty?  Or is it just a dumb joke about its characters being stupid?  I'm leaning toward the latter.

Is it really one of the best comics of the year?  No. Let's get some fresh blood in here, please.  There must be some comic strip or webcomic that covers this sort of material better.  Tom the Dancing Bug? Perry Bible Fellowship? Hell, even Johnny Ryan's Blecky Yuckarella takes Kaz's style and makes it darker, more disturbing, and much, much funnier.

"Hillbillys 'R' Dumb"

By Doug Allen

Oh, come on.  How anyone can consider this the best American anything is beyond me.  Over two pages, some animal rednecks have a hootenanny by the side of the road, then some Yankee tourists stop their car to watch, and the hillbillies murder and eat them, then drive their car around recklessly (since they're drunk on moonshine) and run over one of their own.  And that's it.  I suppose one might find this funny, but the art is lackluster and not all that easy to follow, and while "white trash" might be the last acceptable group to ridicule, I don't see any humor in presenting them as drunken, murderous morons.  This is pretty awful.

Is it really one of the best comics of the year?  God, no.

"Why I Write Only About Myself..."

By Aline Kominsky-Crumb

A one-page comic by Robert Crumb's wife, this is a pretty stiffly-illustrated talking head strip in which Kominsky-Crumb narcissistically explains that she only makes autobiographic comics because she doesn't find anything else interesting.  Sure, it's a bit self-deprecating, admitting that she's vain and gossipy, but that doesn't make its attitude any more palatable.  And the ugly art doesn't help either.  This is kind of the epitome of the "boring indie autobio" comics that people like to complain about.

Is it really one of the best comics of the year?  No, no matter who she's married to.

"Our Beloved Tape Dispenser"

By Robert Crumb and Aline Kominsky-Crumb

This, on the other hand, works as one of those stories about the authors' personal lives, perhaps because it sees the creator(s) actually interact with other people and reveal something interesting about themselves.  The couple explains how they acquired a huge, old-fashioned dispenser of packing tape, and Crumb being the anti-modernist that he is, it became a prized possession.  They even end up making a trip to visit the company that manufactures them, doing a little bit of journalistic work and describing the business, its history, and its place in American life both past and present.  The back-and-forth between Crumb and Kominsky-Crumb makes for a good conversational rhythm, and that gets emphasized through the art, which sees each cartoonist drawing the depictions of themselves (although it does look like Crumb drew all the backgrounds and all the other characters, and probably did the coloring which makes his wife's art look much nicer here than in her solo previous strip) and even lettering their own dialogue.  The back-and-forth is really well done, and seeing the couple collaborate to tell about an interesting bit of their life makes for a good anecdote, like a story told over dinner.

Is it really one of the best comics of the year?  Yes.  Sometimes those perpetual selectees are chosen for a reason.  Crumb is one of the all-time greats, and he managed to elevate his wife's sub-par work to his own level here.

"Indian Spirit Twain & Einstein"

By Michael Kupperman

Man, Kupperman is a goofball; this is some funny stuff.  He turns Mark Twain and Albert Einstein into a pair of buddy cops who go about nonsensical adventures committing acts of violence, all in the usual deadpan style of the comics in his Tales Designed to Thrizzle series.  The way he completely ignores the characters' real-life history, and even doesn't bother to distinguish which of them is which, is especially funny, and the fake ads in the margins of every page add to the weird, faux-old-timey nature of the comic.  Nobody would mistake this for an actual comic from decades past, but it's strange and straight-faced enough that one who happened upon it might wonder about its origins.  It's pretty sublime in its humor.

Is it really one of the best comics of the year?  Probably.  There might be "better" comics out there, but when it comes to humor, Kupperman is certainly one of the best and most unique.

"Spirit Duplicator"

By Dan Zettwoch

Zettwoch is a singular comics creator, someone who uses the medium to its full extent, filling pages with information and goofy details.  He loves descriptive notes, arrows, diagrams, and little throwaway gags.  This story is presented as a series of illustrated church bulletins selected from a decades-long run, supposedly drawn by Zettwoch's uncle Darryl, with commentary provided by the "cartoonist", including descriptions of printing methods, historical tidbits, explanations of running jokes, and lots of other little details.  It's a fun little faux-history, and it even ends up being kind of poignant as Darryl retires.  It's a unique way to present a story, with the interesting personal details all being implied and in the background.  Zettwoch loves to experiment, and this one certainly paid off.

Is it really one of the best comics of the year?  Yes.  Zettwoch is one of the most exciting, creative young cartoonists currently making comics, and this is a good example of what he does well.

"The Company"

By Matt Broersma

In this excerpt from Broersma's graphic novel Insomnia, a TV producer gets fired, breaks things off with his mistress, finds that his wife has gone missing, and then gets strangely entangled with a childhood friend of hers that might or might not be lying about identity issues.  It's an interesting little bit of what appears to be a crime story, but it's hard to tell where it could be going from here.  That's not a complaint though; it's compelling enough to make one want to seek out the whole story to find out the whole story.  Broersma's clean line is pretty nice here, filling backgrounds with detail but leaving the characters inscrutably solemn-faced, inviting readers to speculate about inner emotional turmoil.  It's very nice work.

Is it really one of the best comics of the year?  Sure.  Excerpts from longer works can be tricky in books like this, but this one is near-perfect, giving just enough to entice readers into seeking out the whole thing.

Shortcomings (Excerpt)

By Adrian Tomine

Now, this doesn't seem fair.  At least one other volume of the Best American Comics series (the 2007 one) contained an excerpt from this story; in how many years was it one of the best comics?  Since the hardcover collection of the story came out in November 2007, it is eligible, but it doesn't seem right.  Anyway, the portion seen here is from the final third of the story, and it's good, although it might be a bit hard to follow if you haven't read the rest of the story.  It sees the protagonist, Ben Tanaka, pursue his estranged girlfriend across the country and confront her when he finds out she's dating someone else.  There are plenty of racial issues wrapped up in this, since he and his girlfriend are both Asian, and her new boyfriend is white, and this gives Tomine a chance to have Ben explicate his feelings at length to his friend and her girlfriend, in a way that does not endear him to readers.  As with the whole story, it's amusing, but ugly, so it's up to the reader to determine if they want to spend any time with such an insufferable asshole of a main character.  That's Tomine for you.

Is it really one of the best comics of the year?  Sure, although it does seem like its inclusion is even more backward-looking than usual.

Over Easy (Excerpt)

By Mimi Pond

This is actually an excerpt from a graphic novel that Pond is serializing online, and it's quite good.  It's a semi-autobiographical story that sees its protagonist, a young art-school student named Margaret, happen into a small diner and get to know its staff, including a hippy-ish owner who enthuses about cilantro (a.k.a Chinese parsley) and trades her a free meal for a drawing of the establishment.  The blue-tinted artwork is quite lovely, and full of detail and expressive characters, with Pond really making the setting come to life and using some neat techniques, like having the words of a caption swirl around inside a cup of coffee.  It's a good little story, personal yet relatable, and one that encourages reading of the rest of the work.

Is it really one of the best comics of the year?  Yes.  It's good to see online comics included, especially ones that aren't of the usual "newspaper strip with dirty words" style.

"Portrait of the Artist As a Young %@&*!"

By Art Spiegelman

This is actually only an excerpt of the autobiographical strip that Spiegelman did to accompany the rerelease of his Breakdowns collection, and while it does include some interesting bits, it leaves out the best stuff, which saw him discover EC Comics as a child and get excited about the possibilities of the medium.  What we see here is limited to the anecdote about a childhood bully spitting on Spiegelman's mother, a memory about being scared of Alice in Wonderland, a sort of experimental thing about characters writing fiction versus nonfiction, and a page that repeats the imagery of the first scene with the coloring off-set and the captions and word balloons filled with a quote about art from Victor Shklovsky.  As a portion of the longer work, it doesn't really offer much of the richness of Spiegelman's story and memories, and since it only contains pieces here and there, it doesn't flow very well at all.  The full comic is a good one, but you wouldn't know it from what you see here.

Is it really one of the best comics of the year?  No, at least not what we get here.  The full story is worth reading though, so don't let this fool you.

"Cruddy"

By Ron Rege, Jr.

This is actually an adaptation of a prose short story (or perhaps a chapter of a longer story?) by Lynda Barry, which makes it kind of a weird, secondhand bit of storytelling that might or might not make more sense if one had read the original work.  It's hard to tell what exactly happens here, what with Rege's confusing, backgroundless art, but apparently a couple kids come across a hippie, and then they smoke pot together.  And that's it.  I've never warmed to Rege's art, although I should probably try to read some of his longer stuff and see if I can discern what all the fuss is.  This short certainly doesn't endear him to me any more; it's impossible to tell the ages of the characters, since they're all drawn in the same rounded style, and while some of the postures and gestures seem naturalistic, the movements are hard to follow, so it's a struggle to tell what is going on.  The dialogue is odd and nonsensical as well, and while that might be Barry's fault rather than Rege's, it doesn't make the story any more readable.  

Is it really one of the best comics of the year?  Nope, not in the slightest.

"When I Was Eleven"

By Gabrielle Bell

This story seems like it might be autobiographical, but Bell's note in the "Contributors' Notes" section indicates that it is fictional.  Either way, it's quite good, following a young girl who likes summer camp so much that she decides to run away and live there in the off-season.  It's full of Bell's excellent character work, which comes out in both her expressive artwork (which conveys repressed emotion really well in an almost minimalist manner and evokes mood wonderfully through nicely-shaded settings) and her writing, especially the realistic narration.  Bell is a regular selectee for this series, and it's easy to see why, with her stories that manage to capture a time and place so well and fill them with compelling little stories about real-seeming people.  

Is it really one of the best comics of the year?  Yes.  Bell's short stories are perfect for this type of collection, and she deserves every bit of recognition she gets.

Dal Tokyo

By Gary Panter

Panter is another cartoonist that I just don't get.  I don't understand the appeal of his rough, indistinct art, and from what I've seen, the storytelling is pretty inscrutable, with dialogue being nonsensical and any movement hard to follow.  These strips are apparently part of a series that runs in the Japanese magazine Riddim (wait, isn't this supposed to be the best American comics?), so maybe it makes more sense if more of it has been read, but I doubt it, and the right-to-left reading format (which comes from being published in Japan, but has to be discerned here, since there is no direction telling readers the correct way to read the comic) makes reading it even more unintuitive.  The story appears to be some sort of strange Western/post-apocalypse thing, with a couple wandering a wasteland riding either a scooter or a horse-like insect, and occasionally stopping to live in a hut, fight a giant slug, or encounter weird shit.  While some of the designs are interesting, like the barren landscape or that ugly slug, there's no real story to speak of, and the words that fill the word balloons don't make much sense either.  What a waste, both of the time it takes to read, and the space in this book that could have been filled with something readable.

Is it really one of the best comics of the year?  No, although I'm sure many will disagree, for some artsy-fartsy reason or other.

"Disinfected Youth", "Gravel Migration", and "The Wide Riders"

By Ben Katchor

These three one-page strips, which come from Katchor's regular gig doing a monthly comic for Metropolis magazine, are funny in an oddly surreal way, taking a skewed view of modern American life through goofy ideas like a societal attack on bacteria that is countered through candy produced in a filthy factory, a man who obsesses over the gravel that slowly disappears from his driveway, and the psychological and geographical reasons that some men ride public transportation with their legs spread extra wide.  The stories are weird and deadpan, and the scratchy, pastel-colored art is perfect for containing their jittery energy.  It might take a particular sensibility to enjoy this sort of comic, but if it hits your sweet spot, it's pretty sublime.

Is it really one of the best comics of the year?  Yes.  This is good, amusing work that sticks in the mind after reading it, prodding at the unconsidered ideas upon which society is based.  I need to read more of Katchor's work.

"Annoyed X Girlfriend", "Dad Coming Down the Cellar Stairs", "Sally in the Public Toilet", "Tree Pee", "Summer Shower", and "Church Miracle"

By Jerry Moriarty

These wordless single-page strips are richly painted and kind of interesting to try to follow, but they don't ultimately add up to much.  One sees a woman paint black scribbles over a painting of a young couple naked in bed; in another, a woman in a public restroom gets weirded out by a leg protruding under the wall from the next stall as somebody throws up; a third features two women running for shelter from the rain in a dilapidated house, with the second removing her shirt.  Maybe those are supposed to be jokes, but it's hard to tell; in fact, Moriarty's stiff figurework makes it difficult to follow the action at all.  I'm not sure if Moriarty is trying to tell a continuous story about one of these women, or if these are just isolated vignettes which might or might not be interesting to anybody.  The only one that I found amusing rather than head-scratching was the final one, in which a woman is praying in a church, and another woman comes in an kneels in front of her, with the final panel revealing a beam of light shining through a window directly on the second's rear end, as if God is checking out her ass.  That one managed to convey a simple concept clearly, but the others just sort of seem to sit there without much of a message or purpose.  Moriarty is supposed to be one of the greats of underground comics, but while he might have done good work in the past, I'm not seeing much to celebrate here.

Is it really one of the best comics of the year?  No, although that may just because I prefer my comics to tell a clear story, or at least fill pages with something that seems worthwhile to spend the time to read.

"Mosfet Warlock and the Mechlin Men"

By CF

I wasn't especially enamored of Chris "CF" Forgues' Powr Mastrs when I first read it, but reading this story from that first volume of the series on its own, rather than surrounded by a bunch of seemingly-unrelated weirdness, it works pretty good as a bit of strange fantasy, and features some pretty cool artwork.  The story follows a magician who works to discover the secret of "transmut[ing] dead flesh into a living metal".  He experiments, and manages to turn some severed heads into "seeds" composed of electronic circuitry, which, when planted, grow into metal men that become his servants.  It's a pretty simple story, but the interesting thing here is Forgues' artwork, which uses ultra-thin lines to detail some incredible, bizarre, trippy scenes of Warlock experimenting with crazy equipment, transforming into some sort of worm, and spewing out an inky black cloud with a face that ends up demonstrating the secret he is seeking.  It might not make much sense, but it seems to work within the boundaries of its defined world, making for an interesting vignette that suggests a rich milieu surrounding it.  That might or might not be the case, depending on what you think of the rest of the series, but it works well for a short while, at least.

Is it really one of the best comics of the year?  Yeah, sure, even I don't think the rest of the volume is.  Sometimes shorter is better.

"Lo-Bot-O-My-Heart", "Slumburbia", and "Heart of Darkness"

By David Sandlin

Of the three pieces of Sandlin's included here, two aren't even comics, but kind of surreal paintings, which is a poor choice for a book of the best American comics.  The third, "Slumburbia", appears to be a sort of stream-of-consciousness critique of modern American society, presented as several one-page strips that see people sleeping through their lives, slaving away for their corporate masters/monsters, and engaging in lots of sexual perversity.  The imagery is all jumbled together, sometimes broken up by actual panels, but often running together, with infomercial-like captions running through it.  It's kind of ugly, and not as shocking as it hopes to be, the same sort of complaints about consumerism, gossip, and sexuality that gets bandied about regularly by social critics.  It's boring, and for something that seems to intend to shock, that's not good.

Is it really one of the best comics of the year?  No, and hopefully I'm not just soured by Sandlin being recognized here for some non-comics work.

"The Galactic Funnels"

By Dash Shaw

This short story might be a bit more densely symbolic than Shaw's usual work, but it's still pretty interesting.  In the future, some conical cosmic apparitions are visible in the night sky, and a boy named Stan Smart becomes obsessed with them, and especially with an artist named Don Dak who draws paintings of them depicted from above (i.e. circles).  When he grows up, Stan enters art school, studies under Don, and starts drawing his own circular depictions of the funnels, eventually eclipsing his mentor, but never seeming to do anything other than draw circles, or, in a bit of avant garde pique, drawing them from an angle as ovals.  At the end of the story, after Don's death, Stan realizes that he's missing the whole picture; the funnels are three-dimensional cones, not the simple, flat shapes he's been depicting.  It's hard to tell what exactly Shaw is trying to say with this, but it suggests all sorts of interpretations about art, teachers, students, inspiration, representation, and who knows what else.  It's pretty fascinating stuff, and Shaw's art is as rich as ever, full of expression, movement, and color, along with an interesting rhythm that sees the narrative occasionally interrupted to show examples of Stan's art.  Shaw is an idea machine, and this is only one cog in the magnificent whole.

Is it really one of the best comics of the year?  Yes, and Shaw is sure to see more work published in future volumes, I suspect.

Berlin (Excerpt)

By Jason Lutes

This series is another regular feature in the Best American Comics volumes, and although I still regrettably have yet to read the longer work, it certainly seems worthy of inclusion every time.  This portion of the story sees a foul-mouthed man and his lover (mistress? whore?) get badgered for rent from his landlady, and when he chases her off without paying, she goes to her Communist comrades for help, with violent results.  In another scene, a hungry young woman looks for help from a Jewish friend, who welcomes her into his home for a meal and study session, only to have her get lectured on King David by his grandfather.  As with other excerpts I've read, Lutes has created a rich, detail-packed world here that is based on real history, and his art is exquisite, every panel full of clean-lined depictions of the characters and their surroundings.  It's gorgeous work, and every bit of it that I sample makes me want to experience the full story more.

Is it really one of the best comics of the year?  Yes, although next year's excerpt will probably need to be really good to merit inclusion once again.

Strips from Maakies

By Tony Millionaire

Millionaire has been cranking out this strip for years, and he doesn't show any signs of letting up, continually filling his rectangles with goofy jokes about drunkenness, violence, and bad behavior, along with some really pretty artwork.  The selections here are pretty great, alternating between the wacky antics of Drinky Crow and Uncle Gabby and odd, apparently autobiographical bits about killing slugs with salt and the like, along with one strange little story about a girl obsessed with finding a wolf-headed baby in a paper bag on the side of the road.  Every strip is weird and memorable, and often really, really funny.  Millionaire has such an imagination for coming up with silly gags and opportunities to depict wild action and densely-shaded art.  It's beautiful.

Is it really one of the best comics of the year?  Yes.  I hope Millionaire can keep going with this (or comics like it) in perpetuity.

"Black Death (Chapter Two)"

By Sammy Harkham

This might be the second part of a longer story, but it would be interesting if it started here, something that begins in media res with a man waking up in a forest, his body bristling with arrows and a rope tied to his waist, tethering him to a mute giant.  They come across a well and end up rescuing a man trapped at its bottom.  This amiable fellow appears to be a naked wild man who leads them in circles through the woods, stopping to tell his tragic story and identify the giant as a golem.  It's a freewheeling tale, just a bit of time spent with these odd characters, although it doesn't finish so much as just stop (which probably just indicates that it's not the end, and there is more story to come).  Harkham's art is pretty great, with rounded, fluidly-moving characters against a lush background, and a unique pinkish-orange hue that drops out for a stark black-and-white sequence that shows the golem's origin.  Very good work, something that encourages more exploration into Harkham's oeuvre.

Is it really one of the best comics of the year?  Yes.  Hey, shouldn't Harkham edit one of these?  He's already shown himself pretty capable with Kramers Ergot...

"Jordan W. Lint"

By Chris Ware

This probably goes without saying, but Chris Ware is a pretty amazingly good comics creator.  This story, which should make up a good portion of the upcoming next volume of Acme Novelty Library, follows Jordan Lint, a minor character in the "Rusty Brown" saga, throughout his entire life, each page jumping forward a year and depicting a few minutes at a time.  This might seem like a difficult way to define a character, but it works wonderfully under Ware's hands, ranging from early-twenties difficulties with adult responsibility and romance to eventual marriage and family life, with Lint remaining the same recognizable person throughout, but realistically aging and changing as the years progress.  Ware uses a variety of storytelling techniques here as well, with some pages broken into small panels full of word balloons and captions, and others being silent, with one notable strip being completely silent and depicting a graphic, doctor's-eye-view of childbirth.  He also sometimes sneaks mental imagery into tiny marginal strips that depict memories or fantasies, and his facility with expression and emotion really brings Lint to life, even if he's kind of an asshole.  It's beautiful stuff.

Is it really one of the best comics of the year?  Yes, definitely.  I can't wait to read the rest of the story when the next Acme comes out.

Fuzz and Pluck in Splitsville (Excerpt)

By Ted Stearn

In this excerpt from Stearn's graphic novel, a teddy bear and a featherless chicken have wacky adventures which also feature a bunch of other anthropomorphic animals, along with an antagonist of a lemon bearing an angry face.  There's lots of silliness, like aimless drifting on river rafts, chicken wrestling, and other nonsense, but while it's rendered quite well with lots of cartoony expression and detail, it doesn't seem like anything all that special.  Maybe the story is quite enjoyable as a whole, but this portion just seems like a parade of goofy adventure without anything especially eye-catching in the way of humor or action.  It's probably worth reading, but it doesn't seem all that award-worthy.

Is it really one of the best comics of the year?  No; it's more of a solid mid-lister, enjoyable for what it is but not something to push on people as a book they have to read. 

"Freaks"

By Laura Park

This story was published in Superior Showcase, which features superhero stories by indie artists, but its superheroic content is negligible.  Instead, it's a touching story about two elementary-school-aged siblings who get picked on at school and have to fend for themselves at home.  The older sister takes care of the younger brother, and their rapport is quite touching, full of genuine feeling and caring, with at least two moments that are genuinely tear-jerking without being mawkish.  Park's art is beautifully expressive in its cartoony emotion, and she fills pages with plenty of rich cross-hatched detail, making the chaotic school and empty house really come to life.  It's moving and lovely, a really good story.

Is it really one of the best comics of the year?  Definitely; this is another example of something that is perfect for this series.

Skim (Excerpt)

Written by Mariko Tamaki

Art by Jillian Tamaki

This graphic novel won a great deal of acclaim upon its release (I liked it well enough, and I think it has only grown in my estimation since), and for good reason; it's a well-realized tale of teen angst, not being sure of who you are or understanding the onslaught of emotion that comes with adolescence.  Plus, the art is beautiful, perfectly capturing the postures and movements of teenage girls and situating them in a tactile, moody world of school hallways and gloomy forests.  This excerpt is a great sample of what the story has to offer, as the main character learns of a classmate's boyfriend's suicide and has to endure a gauntlet of scrutiny because of her goth lifestyle, then becomes enamored of her creative, exciting English teacher.  Anybody reading this should know if it's a story they will want to read more of.

Is it really one of the best comics of the year?  Yes; if there's any justice in the world, both Tamakis are on their way to comics stardom.

"Antoinette"

By Koren Shadmi

This short story sees a young man flirt, party, and eventually sleep with a girl he has a crush on, who just happens to have a blank stump of a neck and a decapitated head that she carries around under her arm.  That's a hell of a weird detail to throw in, but Shadmi plays it straight, with the characters acting as if there's nothing strange about this.  It might be a metaphor about separating the mind from the body, with the guy mostly lusting after the body, but there's also the possibility of a comment about separating your sense of reason from yourself when drinking and partying to excess.  Whatever the case, it's pretty well-drawn, with good facial expressions and a realistic sense of movement and gesture, along with a few good gags, like the girl picking up her head like a bowling ball.  Interesting, and a good introduction to Shadmi's work.

Is it really one of the best comics of the year?  I'll say yes, but some might find it kind of slight.  Opinions: they're like noses.

"Glenn Ganges in 'Pulverize'"

By Kevin Huizenga

Huizenga is another artist that I didn't quite get, but I think I'm coming around on him.  He has a simple-seeming style, with cartoony characters and often using standard, non-showy layouts, but that downplays his skill with storytelling, his ability to convey information very, very well without layering on too much detail.  This story is one that has been mentioned as one of his best, seeing regular Huizenga protagonist Glenn Ganges working for a 90s dot-com company and becoming increasingly obsessed with the eponymous first-person shooter game that he plays with his coworkers after hours.  As the company edges closer toward the notorious bust that we all know happened in real life, the game ends up being a way for Glenn and his fellow players to blow off steam and find a way to deal with the chaos of the rest of their lives.  It's a rich tale, full of details that bring it to life, like the intricacies of the gameplay or the way it alters Glenn's view of the real world, and with the little moments of regular life that happen between gameplay sessions (I especially liked the way the CEO's word balloons always seem to end with "blah blah etc." to reflect the meaningless of his execu-speak).  It's a great story, and while it's fictionalized, it seems very real, which is saying something given Huizenga's cartoon abstractions and Tintin-style character design.  

Is it really one of the best comics of the year?  Yes; I'm starting to feel like I really need to catch up on all the Huizenga work I've missed.

"5:45 A.M."

By Al Columbia

This story consists of a series of silent panels depicting a house seen at the titular moment in time, and as with most of Columbia's work, they're all fraught with creepiness.  How he manages to make simple scenes of a coffee maker or a bed so freaky is a mystery, but it might have to do with the dim lighting or the strangely specific details.  It all builds to an especially creepy glimpse of a human face, suggesting a horror story but refusing to fill in any details, making it all unfold in the reader's imagination.  It's skillful work on Columbia's part, an example of why he is so revered in the field despite having produced so little work.

Is it really one of the best comics of the year?  Sure, although it is definitely slight.  It's very memorable though, and a great example of a type of comics storytelling that few are pursuing.

"Papa"

By Gilbert Hernandez

This story from the current volume of Love and Rockets is apparently related to another story that Gilbert did, "Julio's Day", but that's only indicated in the Contributors' Notes at the back of this book.  It works well on its own though, seeing a man set out from his house, walk through a countryside devastated by mudslides, and swell up disgustingly after eating a worm-infested taco.  The art is gorgeous in its simplicity when depicting characters, especially the grotesque deformity of the man's body, but beautifully baroque in the swirling lines depicting the landscape.  I don't really understand what the story is supposed to be about, but it's still fascinating, and an example of the intuitive storytelling that Gilbert has been doing for the last several years.

Is it really one of the best comics of the year?  Yes,although I preferred a different story, "Victory Dance", from the "issue" that this one came from.  Still, Gilbert Hernandez!  Of course it's good.

"The Hand that Feeds" (Excerpt)

By Anders Nilsen

This is a story from Nilsen's Big Questions series, which apparently sees a bunch of birds and other animals explore the wreckage of a downed airplane, anthropomorphizing them to the extent that they talk, but still act like animals, flocking and eating dead things and living in the wild.  This particular example also sees a bald, possibly imbecilic boy wander through the setting, the birds attacking him when he dares to eat one of their precious doughnuts.  He also has a pet bird that defends him, leading to some interesting depictions of motion:

Nilsen's art is what is really being showcased here; he gives everything a beautiful texture through the thousands of dots that he uses as shading, making for a wonderfully realized environment.  He also puts some amusing dialogue in the birds' mouths, and gives everything a slightly creepy atmosphere.  It's a striking excerpt, one that makes the reader want to experience more of the story.

Is it really one of the best comics of the year?  Yes, although there's not much of it here.  It's enough to make readers salivate for more of Nilsen's art though, so that's probably a positive.

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So, that's only nine out of thirty-three that I thought didn't belong here, which is a pretty good percentage.  It might not have been what I would have chosen as a "best of" for its eligibility period, but that's just a matter of personal taste, and considering the ever-increasing vastness of the comics field, this is a pretty great sampler of the excellence available.  In fact, this might be the best installment of the series yet.  Let's hope for a continuing upward trend; Neil Gaiman '10!

Pluto: Even a robot can cry. And also blow shit up

 Webcomics links: Check out Katie Cook's cute new monster webcomic, Gronk.  Did I mention that it was cute?

For something less cute and more badass, here's a robot action webcomic called Old City Blues, and it looks awesome.

For some essential comics background reading, I want to be sure to highlight this "interview" (really more of an essay) with Joshua Cotter, which confirms my theory that Driven By Lemons was all about mental illness, specifically bipolar disorder.  It's a pretty amazing bit of writing, as Cotter lays his soul bare regarding his insecurities about his work, his uncertainty about future comics, and his own struggles with depression.  If you're at all interested in Cotter's work, this is required reading.

Pluto, volume 8
By Naoki Urasawa

The rule of thumb when it comes to manga is generally that endings can be expected to be weak (and also that series often don't hit their stride until the second volume, but that's less pertinent to this discussion), and that was the fear with this series, that Naoki Urasawa wouldn't be able to bring his story home satisfactorily after such excellence in the series' first two thirds or so.  Those fears should be mitigated by the fact that he was able to wrap the eighteen-volume Monster up well, and Pluto is more of a self-contained work (adapting an already-complete story rather than continuing on as a serialization), but they still lurked, especially after the seventh volume, which was probably the weakest so far.  Of course, that one's faults, as they were, were mostly due to it being the penultimate installment, tasked with putting pieces in place for the final showdown, just barely beginning to answer some of the various ongoing mysteries while still saving the full revelations for the finale.  It wasn't a waste; there was some great action and a growing sense of hopelessness at the oncoming destruction, along with a few really memorable images, like Epsilon wrestling with a tornado, and a creepy-looking adoptive official managing to make himself seem cheerful and kind, only to turn out to be exactly as evil as that first impression indicated.  And best of all, a shot of Epsilon shooting his hands down from out of the sky to offer protection to one of his charges is one of the lasting images from a series that has featured many, many indelible pieces of artwork:

But while that volume was probably an essential bit of pacing and setup, it kind of seemed like stalling before the big finish.  Luckily, the final volume suffers from no such "problems", jumping right into excitement with the awakening of Atom and the subsequent confusion and fear that reigns among Dr. Ochanomizu and his scientific cohorts as they don't know what to expect from him.  Urasawa certainly passes that feeling on to the reader, giving Atom a wide-eyed, inhuman gaze that suggests a struggle to contain boiling internal emotion:

His penchant for scrawling the formula to a deadly bomb all over the walls of his holding cell doesn't help anything either.  But he does eventually get back to normal, just in time to go up against Pluto in a final battle for the fate of the world, with enough time taken in various expositional scenes both before and during the battle to explain exactly what has been going on for the whole series, how Pluto, Sahad, Abullah, Goji, and the mysterious Bora are all related, and what the big, secret plot and string of murders have been all about.  The interesting thing is, it all ends up making sense, but it almost becomes unimportant as the stakes increase, a bit of petty revenge that spirals out of control to threaten all life on Earth.

That's something that Urasawa does so well in this series: explore the basic emotions that humanity experiences, demonstrating how they can affect us in both good and bad ways, but often go unnoticed in the swirling complexity of internal and external stimuli that we all face.  The love for family is the emotion that gets the focus here, turning out to be the main impetus for Abullah's revenge as he sent Pluto to kill everyone even tangentially involved in starting the war that killed his family.  At the same time, we see Atom experiencing Gesicht's memories of starting his own family with his wife after struggling to comprehend the undying love a pair of human parents demonstrated toward a child hostage that he rescued:

His attempt to experience that kind of love for himself (and his wife) leads him to adopt a broken robot for himself and his wife, and Urasawa manages to capture a childlike love from him as he emulates the humans he observed:

It's moving stuff, reminding us that while we like to think that parents and families have maturity and intelligence, those strong emotions can often make us block out everything else, leading us to take actions that we wouldn't rationally consider in pursuit of protection or anger when our loved ones are threatened.  We're all robots on the inside, I guess.

This sort of examination of humanity is fascinating, but this being the final volume of the series, Urasawa doesn't do too much navel-gazing.  Instead, he closes things out with a bang, pitting Atom and Pluto against each other in a rage-and-hate-fueled battle that's harsh, violent, and destructive, with Atom possibly even coming off as the scarier of the two as he launches into a litany of Pluto's crimes and swears to kill him, anger written across his face as his blasts through the air and begins tearing off robotic body parts:

It's an amazing bit of action on Urasawa's part, with Atom successfully transforming from the vulnerable-seeming kid of earlier volumes to the high-flying, superheroic Astro Boy that we know and love, but with a dangerous edge that his sister Uran recognizes from thousands of miles away as something that could destroy his soul if he goes too far (why, he's almost like a certain righteous military superpower performing unspeakable deeds in the pursuit of "justice"!).  The fight might be cathartic, but it's not going to do anybody any good of the world gets destroyed in the process.

In the end, good manages to triumph over evil, as was a certainty from the beginning, but Urasawa makes it count, giving all parties the proper emotional release, and attempting to impart lessons about humanity in the process.  That's what Pluto has been all about, and it's been a fascinating, enlightening bit of fiction, something  to ponder on multiple levels, from the sci-fi ideas to the symbolic commentary on current events, from the excellently-developed characters to the gorgeous artwork that fully defined a complex futuristic world, from the small, emotional moments to the big, exciting action.  It's been a remarkable work of comics throughout, something that we're all lucky to be able to experience.  Now, who's up for translating Billy Bat?

Bodyworld: It's a wonderlaaaand...

Since it's bee a little while since I've done a straight review post, there's lots of links to clear out of the queue:

Elsewhere: At Comics Bulletin, I reviewed World War Hulks: Hulked-Out Heroes #1 and  Firestar #1. Since then, Marvel has decided to no longer send pre-release PDFs of their comics to review sites (it's a long story, which I'm sure Bleeding Cool or somebody has already covered), so that may well be the end of my writing for that site.  Probably not a big loss for them, but now I can concentrate on not writing for my own blog instead.

I also wrote about some episodes of Fringe and the movie Black Dynamite at The Factual Opinion, so I guess I won't be limited to this corner of the internet.

Webcomics links: Hey, the latest installment of MySpace Dark Horse Presents has a pretty great little superheroine story by Jaime Hernandez, along the lines of his recent stuff in Love and Rockets.  There's also a creepy body horror story by Simon Spurrier and Christopher Mitten, and "Englourioues Mask-Tards!!!" by Evan Dorkin and Hilary Barta, which is quite hilarious.  Good times.

In other Xaime news, What Things Do (which is turning into a pretty great repository for previously hard to find short comics by a variety of alt-comix creators) has a 2002 short story of his called "The Ghoul Man", and it's awesome.  I'm also digging Dan Zettwoch's "The Ghost of Dragon Canoe".  Comics!  On the internet!

Other miscellaneous links: Here's what looks like a pretty good comics blog: My Comic Book Crisis, written by a 47-year-old woman who recently discovered comics and dove right in, finding tons of great stuff to read and talking about it entertainingly.  Go, read.

Finally:

Bodyworld
By Dash Shaw

Any review of a Dash Shaw comic probably has to begin by mentioning that he's one of the most exciting talents of his generation of cartoonists, his relentless creativity, his drive to keep making and releasing new work, and any number of other plaudits.  But by this point, he has established himself well enough that reading his name on the cover of a book is enough to evoke all those reactions, allowing one to get down to appreciating the work itself apart from the whole cult of personality.  This is a good thing, because there is always a lot to process and consider in Shaw's comics; he's a fascinating creator, coming up with idea after idea, whether they're plot concepts to hang stories on, or formalistic ways of illustrating those stories through his artwork.   It's exciting to see what he does, and he has such an idiosyncratic touch that one never knows what's coming next.

This latest graphic novel is a collection of a comic that Shaw originally serialized online, and the volume itself is structured to reflect that, with pages oriented vertically and the spine at the top of the page rather than the side, making each double-page spread one long series of panels, as if the reader is scrolling down through the images in a web browser.  There are also fold-out maps in the inside front and back covers, allowing readers to use them like separate windows or tabs to check when necessary.  This is somewhat innovative, but also unnecessary, since it is certainly not essential to know exactly where in the setting of the story the various events are taking place.  Perhaps Shaw felt that he had to keep the geography straight and thought readers would share this feeling, but the regular images indicating map location do little more than distract from the story itself.  It is a bit of a window into Shaw's head though, showing what information takes primacy at certain points as he is relating a tale.

And that tale is an interesting one, following a quartet of characters as they experience a drug that provides empathetically telepathic abilities to its users.  In a near future that is hinted to be somewhat apocalyptic, or at least ravaged and ugly, one Professor Paulie Panther visits the bucolic town of Boney Borough, a sheltered villa free from the depravities of the rest of the world.  He's a researcher into various hallucinogens, and he's there to try smoking a newly-discovered bit of plant life.  His sojourn ends up affecting the lives of two students, dumb jock Billy Bob Borg and big-city dreamer Pearl Peach, and their teacher, Jem Jewel (Shaw certainly has a knack for coming up with goofy names.  Hey, it's the future!).  While there are interesting wrinkles in the story, that's about it; the whole thing mostly involves these four characters bouncing off each other.  As much as Shaw likes to play with neat ideas, he's also good at limiting his stories to small casts, defining his characters well, and exploring their emotional reactions to events as much as the events themselves.

So, it turns out that this plant has the effect of mentally connecting the smoker with whoever is nearby, such that they their thoughts, sensations, memories, emotions, and actions become intertwined.  Paul discovers this slowly, allowing Shaw to come up with some lowbrow comedy as he's figuring it out (the breasts he grows after being near Jewel are one particularly funny touch), as well as spend some time getting to know the other characters.  The whole drug concept gives him plenty of opportunities to experiment, and it's fascinating to see the different ways he depicts the characters getting inside each other's heads and experiencing memories that aren't their own.  He goes all out, superimposing images, swapping characters' positions to indicate how one is feeling another's sensations, mixing up distinctive facial features, overlapping descriptive words in remembered dialogue, and other new ideas on every page.

It's impressive work, but what's even more fascinating than the ideas of how to communicate this sort of information through comics is that the emotions underlying everything feel real, and one can relate to the characters and their lives even as they are going through such fantastical experiences.  The way Pearl sees Paul as an exciting rebel who can take her away from her small-town drudgery, or how she symbolizes a lost love for him are familiar and understandable, a wonderful way to make the crazy drug concepts fit in with everything else.

It's a great combination of emotional realism, science fiction concepts, and experimentation with the language of comics. Shaw is sure to cover all three areas, with new plot and setting ideas popping up regularly, like a game called "Dieball" that combines full-contact athletics with concepts from role-playing games like grid-based movement and a ten-sided die, or making the drug be a plot by aliens to make Earth easier to conquer by erasing humanity's individuality.  And the formal play is fascinating, both in the aforementioned inter-identity hallucinations, but also in ways of depicting emotion and memory.  The use of color is especially noteworthy, with Shaw alternating between flat, solid hues and then bursting into expressive flourishes, with paint splattered and swirled across pages in bold strokes.  It's gorgeous, exciting work that's full of life and energy, tons of fun to read and contemplate.

While Shaw had previously made his name with The Bottomless Belly Button and various short stories, this seems like a real defining work for his career.  He's full of ideas, and he has a drive to create, but he's also fascinated with the way people interact and emote, and he's constantly striving to come up with new ways to depict that part of humanity.  There might be some complaints, such as occasionally shaky figure work, but seeing the way he keeps energetically moving forward, pushing himself to create and get his ideas down on paper, small deficiencies are forgivable, the mark of a bright mind at work, one barely able to contain its contents.  It's a glorious thing to see develop, and with each new work, Shaw makes it clear that he's going to be one of the defining talents of this current golden age of comics.  Whatever is in the pipeline will be exciting to see, but the complexity and richness of his current work will be enough to keep readers occupied until the next career highlight comes along.

C2E2 2010: It's all about the commerce

Since criticism is the primary purview of this blog, here are some reviews of items purchased at the convention.  Enjoy!

Oh No
By John Campbell



John Campbell's webcomic Pictures for Sad Children has a really strange style, with a minimalist approach to artwork and a rhythm that emphasizes a constant feeling of awkwardness, often along with a crushing sense of despair.  But it's also really funny!  This handmade minicomic (all the elements on the front cover are glued on) collects a bunch of strips from over the past year, and while they don't all work, with some being just strange rather than poignant or funny, it's a great sample of the comic, showing off its strengths and weaknesses.  How Campbell is able to wring such pathos out of his one-step-above-stick-figure characters is nearly inexplicable, but it's a perfect style for what he does, with the circular heads atop squarish bodies and simple lines for arms evoking downcast eyes, hunched posture, shame, sadness, despair, etc.  Conversely, that minimalism also works to make people doing terrible things (like parents making their toddler fall down and hurt himself over and over so they can capture it perfectly with their camera) seem blase and unemotional.  The pacing of the strips is effective as well, with silent panels often interspersed within scenes of dialogue for maximum awkwardness, or stretching strange monologues (like a pastor describing how God personally ensures everyone's suffering, or a airshow emcee describing the fighter jets bombing villages) out over several panels, with the lack of punctuation adding an extra bit of creepiness.  It's a weird comic, but if you share Campbell's dark, deadpan sense of humor, it's pretty great.
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Outreach #1-2
By Raina Telgemeier

Raina Telgemeier has gained a good measure of success with her books like Smile or her adaptations of the Babysitters Club novels, and it's easy to see why, with her clean, expressive line and excellent character art.  She also does talks and workshops for kids, and these two minicomics collect some memorable incidents (which is probably too strong a word for what they are; "comments" or "exchanges" would be better) from such appearances.  Kids make great fodder for stories, since their innocence and openness often lead to hilarity, and that's exactly what Telgemeier demonstrates here, with her art making it all extra cute.  A boy can't think of any ideas for comics unless he can use swear words, or a girl insists on being called "Ketchup".  It's fun stuff, making Telgemeier's job and life look like a hell of a lot of fun.
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Girlfuck
By Erika Moen

Erika Moen's recently-ended webcomic DAR is tons of fun to read, due to her nice artwork and complete, uninhibited frankness about sexuality.  She doesn't hold anything back when discussing that part of her life, and this minicomic, subtitled "An Introduction to Girl-on-girl Lovin'", benefits from that approach, working as a cute guide to lesbian sex, from anatomical explanations, to toys, to the question of whether penetration suggests the "desire for a man", to health and hygeine, and even a short bit about gender identification.  It's all very informative, and presented with Moen's usual sense of humor, making it a fun read as well as an interesting one.  Made in 2005, the art is a bit different from Moen's current style, so those used to her depiction of herself might be a bit weirded out, but aside from that, the anatomical diagrams, drawings of sex toys, and images of people talking about sex are all pretty great.  If this is a subject about which you're curious, by all means, check the comic out.
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Papercutter #12
By Rachel Bormann, Nate Powell, Joey Alison Sayers, Mark Campos, and Dalton Webb

This latest issue of Tugboat Press's anthology series features three interesting stories, although the obvious draw is the lead tale, "The Uncomfortable Gaze of Carlos Santana", by Rachel Bormann and Nate Powell.  Powell is the creator of the excellent Swallow Me Whole, and he contributes more of his excellent artwork here, although the story itself is a bit obtuse and hard to follow.  It sees a young woman and her father attending a Santana concert, during which she apparently has some sort of telepathic conversation with the guitarist while he is playing, desperately making up lies about why the two of them don't seem to be having a good time.  It's strange, but kind of funny, and Powell's art is as wonderful as ever, with lots of shadows filling the edges of the images, some great expressiveness in faces and bodies, and that amazing glare that Santana keeps shooting the characters, living up to the title.  It might not be an essential story, but it sure is entertaining.

The second story, "Pet Cat", is by Joey Alison Sayers, creator of the webcomic Thingpart, and it's amusing, certainly more so than the work that can be seen online (which seems like a less art-focused, less surreal, less interesting Perry Bible Fellowship).  It details the ever-changing authorship of a lame Garfield-esque comic strip called "Oh No, Pet Cat", which starts out being drawn by Sayers herself before being handed off to a guy who turns it into a Dick Tracy-style bit of drama and violence, then is inherited by his hipness-obsessed son, the syndicate itself, and eventually aliens attempting to understand human culture, and God himself.  It's cute and fairly funny, and while Sayers' simplistic style (which is like a more detailed, less effective version of John Campbell's round-headed people) might not be for everyone, it works well here.  Sayers might not be the next Nicholas Gurewitch, but hopefully working with stories longer than four panels will lead to more stories like this that are enjoyable and fun.

Finally, Mark Campos and Dalton Webb present "Root Cause" a Pogo-esque story about anthropomorphic animals with Southern accents dealing with life and love.  It follows a teenaged cat and rabbit as they worry about their boyfriends and consult the local wise woman for advice.  While it's pleasant enough, the story is pretty nothing that will change anyone's worldview or anything, but Dalton Webb's art is quite nice, lending a good expressiveness to the animal characters and occasionally offering a pretty image of a house or forest.  Enjoyable stuff; Webb is certainly a talent to watch.

That's what these sorts of small-press anthologies do well: offer interesting stories in a nice-looking package and introduce readers to new talents while providing creators with a chance to try the type of short story they might not do elsewhere.  Whenever they come out, they're almost always worth picking up.
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Funrama Presents: The Mutant Punks #1
By Ryan Kelly

Ryan Kelly seems to be known for serious, realistic comics like Local, so this new book, which serves as an introduction to what he plans to make a long-running self-published project, is an interesting one, taking a humorous, satirical direction and attempting to go crazy with deadpan, anarchic, apocalyptic violence.  It doesn't seem to be a completely comfortable fit for Kelly, but he's certainly stretching and trying something new, and who knows where he's going to go with it.  The story, such as it is, sees a group of five, well, mutant punks, weirdos with superpowers and a desire to spread chaos throughout the modern United States, eventually bringing about its downfall and taking over the world.  Or something like that; the desire seems to be more to wreak havoc than anything else.  There's a weird air of attempted satire hanging over everything, as one character foments a riot between pro- and anti-healthcare protestors at the Texas capitol, the team attacks the Mall of America in order to bring down Western capitalism, and they eventually confront President Obama (shrouded in shadows as he usually is in DC and Marvel comics in order to provide plausible deniability) and nearly change their ways upon hearing one of his emotionally rousing speeches.  Kelly seems to be attempting to do something like Tank Girl here, an anarchic, violent bit of satire, but it seems kind of unfocused and strange, with the main male and female characters taking time out to discuss their deep love for each other and often seeming like morons who don't understand human communication whenever they encounter a non-punk person.  There's also a monster character who gives people lead poisoning and a cat who does nothing but laugh and throw bombs at people (he's called Bombcat), and some stuff about interdimensional travel or something.  I honestly don't know what to make of this or what Kelly is trying to do here or whether any future material will be readable, but it's at least interesting and strange, and pretty beautiful to look at, full of his great artwork.  He's as great as ever at drawing cute girls, and he comes up with some pretty impressive designs and bits of action.  So whatever he ends up doing, I'll be sure to check it out, even if I don't really understand it.
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Tiny Kitten Teeth, Chapter One
Written by Frank Gibson
Art by Becky Driestadt

This this self-published pamphlet collects the first chapter of husband-and-wife team Frank Gibson and Becky Driestadt's webcomic of the same name, which features gorgeous painted art influenced by old-school animation and a kind of inscrutable story.  It does begin to make sense once you read a few pages and get into the atmosphere and rhythm of the thing, but the art seems to be based around the design of individual images rather than cohesive, easy-to-follow layouts, so one has to do a bit of work to be able to follow it.  The story concerns an anthropomorphic cat named Mewsli (who also has a pet cat of his own) moving to the big city of Owltown and falling in with the crowd there (especially a rich, charismatic owl and his dog friend), getting in adventures that involve drunken carousing that he can't remember the next day.  It's fun to read, mostly because of Driestadt's gorgeous artwork, which flattens characters out into two dimensions, but then places them in brightly-colored backgrounds full of angular detail, and somehow makes it all work.  She fills the pages with amazing designs, rooms decorated like the backgrounds of old cartoons (or new ones like Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends), buildings that feature more personality than most comics characters, figures that dance and swirl through the panels, forcing the eye to linger on them and suss out the crazy details of their movement.  Gibson's dialogue is fun too, with characters being as identifiable by their speech patterns as their distinctive designs.  And there are tons of fun ideas, like the way all the alcoholic drinks come in bottles also containing miniature boats.  It's enough to make up for the somewhat obtuse story (we only learn that Mewsli is in the city to attend college near the end of the book) and the outline-free speech balloons that can make it difficult to determine who is speaking.  Gibson and Driestadt definitely have a lot of talent, and given a bit more focus on storytelling, they could have something really special here.  But even as it is, it's unlike anything else out there, and considering the beautiful artwork, it's worth a read in any form.
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Cursed Pirate Girl #3
By Jeremy Bastian

With the ever-growing complaints about the prices of pamphlet comics, one would think that five dollars for a 36-page pamphlet would be a bit steep, but that's certainly not the case here.  Jeremy Bastian crams so much detail into every page of his comics that that five bucks provide more content to the reader than any number of superhero comics pamphlets.  It's mind-boggling to see Bastian's work on display, with images bursting with so much finely-detailed stuff that one can spend hours poring over it to try to identify everything.  How he manages to do it is beyond comprehension, but everything is laid down on the page with exquisitely precise brush-strokes, and what's more, an overabundance of personality.  Bastian's mind is apparently overflowing with crazy imagery, and it's everywhere you look on his pages.  He's certainly crafted a world that allows him to utilize his flights of fancy, a fantastical sea filled with pirate ships staffed by monsters, mutants, and freaks.  Scenes of the deck of a ship see things like birds wearing eye patches, a pumpkin with feet, a six-legged frog sporting tattoos and a pistol, a sheep-headed fellow wearing a hat decorated with skulls and peacock feathers, a man with a hat that bears a miniature cannon manned by insects, and all manner of characters with disproportionate heads and limbs.  And that's just one panel!  Every page is like this, full of filigee detailing the grain of the ship's deck, the gunk covering the pots in the galley, the main character's swirling hair, and curling ropes and octopus tentacles that often form panel borders.  It seems like too much to process, but it never gets old; if anything, the rollicking story moves along like a great yarn crashing from incident to incident and seeing its heroine gamely bounce through her adventures with a preponderance of optimism and spunk.  This is an amazing comic, and while it is the final issue of the miniseries, it ends on a cliffhanger, portending a second volume, so readers don't have to worry about this being the end of Bastian's seafaring adventures.  If all is right with the world, he'll be able to keep making comics like this for a long time to come.