Wall City by Alex Kim

I am slowly working my way through the great books I got at MoCCA this summer. When I went to the fest I had a few things on my list: Tear Stained Make-Up, Black Mane, the new Meathaus (which I didn’t get), and the new Sundays anthology of which Kim is a contributor. Though I knew all graduating members of the CCS class of 2008 had to turn in a thesis, and I have really enjoyed his other comics like Bird & Bear, Kim’s wasn’t really on my radar. Stupid broken radar.

Kim’s characters’ clothing often looks like it has been beset by parasites, which, though the squiggliness may be in part his attempt to develop his own style, works very well in this comic of suppressed emotion. These characters are crawling with internal turmoil, but it is somehow just the way of the world.

Wall City tells the story of a worn out EMT named Minty and his chance encounter with another lost soul in a hoody. She has a dead sister and he has a dead dad, both suicides. Minty hasn’t really processed his father’s death, causing not only his inertia, but hallucinations where his father questions Minty’s inability to get over his somewhat mysterious death. Because of these cues and others, I though Wall City was going to be an unraveling of Minty’s father’s death, where Minty finds his purpose in being a detective of sorts. Instead, Wall City is a beautiful, weird story about grief.

Kim really gets to the weird internal freeze of grieving with his story’s cold and stark atmosphere. The emotional grunt work it takes to move through a death is the central metaphor of the book but instead of lots of crying and being crazy these two build a wall. The wall is both obvious and perfect—a huge feat for such a young creator. The fleeting and often practical nature of relationships forged in grief is shown in the context of the relationship between Minty and hoody girl. Lives are marked differently by the loss of important people in our lives. Some people are swallowed by it. Others are set adrift. The epilogue is a testament to living through it.

Wall City was a great surprise. Please check it out.

Sunday:
Passing recipes back vegetarian
The Sweeney
Tomato staking
Dusty, busted ghost stories make good dreams
Station to station

Monday:
Time to read China Mountain Zhang, I guess
Amanda's hotel comment card
Guten nacht Hallo Berlin

For color

I wish there had been more summer nights like this.

You Ain't No Dancer, vols. 1 & 2, edited by Ed Brisson

I first heard of these anthologies during an Inkstuds binge late one work night. The editor of New Reliable Press was talking about how publishing comics makes you broke and he sounded all depressed, but something about the conversation made me want to check out the books. So I did, and after seeing the contributors list, I ordered the two volumes available. When a tiny packet arrived from Canada a few weeks later, I was a bit surprised. Both have the dimensions of a postcard book.

Volume one has a cover illustration by Dave Cooper, Canadian super-cartoonist, featuring his pale, fleshy women/monsters. The volume features a wide range of styles in black and white. My favorite three stories were “The Curse of Kauai” by Dorothy Gambrel, a funny (and surprisingly affecting) meditation on your 20s for straight women (and selling out for everyone else) done in a more detailed cat and girl style, “Did You Know?” by Dean Trippe, a story about the wreckage a parent wreaks when they abandon a child and the missing parts that child will grow up to notice and “Flood” by Lili Carre, a simple and beautiful take on a relationship affected by Alzheimer’s, where what is merely a rainy night to a lame son is a flood to his sick mother. In fact, this volume had a flood theme—three comics in the collection are about floods, including two very sad and eerie ones by Hope Larson and Drew Weing.

Volume two is themed “youth” which made me shudder a little. I expected many comics about nerdy boys being victimized by peers and society. Luckily my arrogant assumptions didn’t stop me from digging into the collection. The colorful cover by Jeffery Brown looks painted, which was new to me, and I love it. His story, “Chimney Preference” gave me a laugh—it was so sweet and silly. “Indian princesses” by Colleen Mac Issac captures that moment where you and your childhood best friend are suddenly not on the same planet, “Of Course, Of Course, Of Course,” is a story about a nerd boy but K. Thor Jensen’s art is so perfect for the story of a kid trying to develop superpowers, that I forgive him the cliché. “Litter,” by Grant Reynolds is the only story to really show the dark side of the theme, and his does it beautifully and devastatingly and completely word-free.

I hear that volume three will be out in September and I will be sure to pick it up.

Also heard through the internets—love object Kate Beaton was asked to appear in an unspecified issue of YAND, sadly it was a surprise.

Exactly:

"Like the Magical Negro, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl archetype is largely defined by secondary status and lack of an inner life. She's on hand to lift a gloomy male protagonist out of the doldrums, not to pursue her own happiness. In the late '60s and early '70s, MPDGs often took the comely form of spacey hippie chicks burdened with getting grim establishment types to kick back and smell the flowers."

I find that the older I get, the less I care to see relationships with wacky, supposedly artistic, yet so uninspiringly flat, ladies be the turning point for mopey male characters. Those guys are so tortured-- I should care about them because-- wait, why? Wouldn't it be better if all these guys started a flirtation with extreme sports or meth instead? That would be just as realistic, don't you think? It's not that these characters fall in love with the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, they just use her to come to some kind of understanding of themselves. After all the sexin' and/or adventures stop, so does the relationship.

BARF!

Can movie makers please stop thinking the mopey-man-flowers is interesting at all? It is so insulting to any creative woman with a brain and a real life. Sadly female actors and audiences aren't the only ones stiffed by this lameitude, the guy characters in these films end up being merely a more charming bag of tics in the end.

The worst is how many men, especially ones who indulge in lots of media, think that the Magical Pixie Dream Girl exists, and if you are artsy, you could be her. If you don't do your job to shake that artsy boy loose, you'll find out just how disposable you are.

Worse than the MPDG is, of course, the Unbearably Sexy Crazy Lady. USCLs are darker and show more tit. Rather than just flitting away like the MPDG, USCLs get to succumb to drug addiction, suicide or mental illness. Sexy, no? Well, as long as she's out of the way so the protagonist can live his new life...

HATE!

Black Mane by Michael V. LaRiccia

[This review is by B. I pointed him towards this comic at MoCCA. I have been really busy, so he kindly wrote this review to keep it fresh in tryharderland. Enjoy. And, if you were wondering, I feel pretty much the same as he did about the book.]



Just two pages into Black Mane I felt like Michael LaRiccia was calling me out. Within those first couple of pages, a Boston townie motorist-cum-monster apparently mistakes Mike, Black Mane’s protagonist, for someone of Middle Eastern descent. And throughout the book, many others seem to assume Mike is Indian, Latino, or some other “other.” Embarrassingly enough, these moments in the book reminded me of my own surprise when the swarthy guy who sold me the book at MOCCA Fest—who, I admit, had registered as, most likely, Latino in my mind’s eye—revealed that he was, in fact, the (Italian-American) author. Having read his book, I have to wonder now whether he could actually see the thought bubble above my head asking, perplexedly, “Italian?”

This is the sort of often-cringeworthy confusion that Black Mane so effectively captures. Mike constantly questions where he fits in in a world that, in varying degrees of subtlety, shows itself to have serious, serious issues with race and, predominantly, gender. Yes, much like the real world, though I suspect most people experience it in a more coded, less jarring way than Mike does--sometimes the brutality of certain episodes in the book detracts from LaRiccia’s generally incisive observations. But this is probably largely because the art is so damn good at capturing the violence that runs throughout the narrative. Rage, frustration, righteous anger—they all cause the male characters experiencing them to metamorphosize over the course of two, three, four panels into truly disturbing beasts. A guy who thinks his girlfriend is cheating on him turns quasi-demonic, eyes bulging and teeth sharpening, while he scrabbles at her car window. A dude being ejected from a nightclub snarls and salivates, his skin all craggy and reptilian as he resists the bouncers and screams (yes, misguided) racial slurs at Mike. But don’t fret, Mike himself has an alter ego—a creature that seems about equal parts lion, bear, and man topped off with the titular wild black mane of hair. Kind of like the meanest, scariest troll doll you could conjure up on your darkest, evilest bad trip.

As a Boston-born, Italian-American, sensitive guy-type myself, I saw a lot that looked familiar in Black Mane. And I suspect the book speaks particularly well, though certainly not exclusively, to other guys who think a certain way about the world and, probably as a result, have a certain amount of righteous indignation, but who realize, like Mike, that they are just “not a fighter.” And hey, that works. As the book suggests, plenty of fucked-up situations can be remedied without going all Black Mane and beating the shit out of the bad guy. Sometimes all you need to do is be smart enough to tell someone who’s bigger than him.

Lauren Weinstein has a new blog. I read her new book, the giant, eye-catching,Goddess of War last week. More on that later.

She is such a super cool lady. I look forward to keeping up with her blogularly, though she claims that she won't be leaving the house until more work gets done.

linkular

Hooray! Kate Beaton speaks! To inkstuds! For the Canadian artists series!

Her voice is deep and sultry, like mine, but she is much too modest.

***

This is both hilarious and terrifying. Americans are really special. Thanks blogger dashboard.

ARGH!

(Who was the comic character that used to always say that? Was it Cathy? I hope not.)

This morning I was faced not only with the sad fact that my friend The Prog Lady is going home, but also that someone in my apartment building is a total asshole. Or, more likely, the incompetent asshole super of the building is just exhibiting his strongest traits. When I looked out the window this morning to assuage the rolling nausea of a new day, instead of a clear vista to the chain link there was a giant, broken trash bag filled plopped unceremoniously into my fern garden. Judging from the broken weed tree branches littering the ground, this bag of bricks, broken pottery and dirt was heaved from a great height.

Ferns are brittle.

I am angry.

Why do I suspect SuperJerk? Well, because he was asked to help clear the fire escape to amend a violation, is ignorant as hell, and doesn't tend to think things through. As helpfully pointed out by B, the bag was also obviously calculated to have a soft landing, as to not wake us up, exposing a shady side to the thrower that SJ definitely has. I wonder if it will still be there when I get home tonight. Judging by the bags of trash still sitting in the corner that he was supposed to help us with 2 years ago, I think yes.

Luckily, ferns are also frondalicious, so the damage should be covered in a few weeks.

Indelible: A Collection Brought to You by Women of CCS edited by Kubby Barry and C. Frakes

Indelible caught my eye at MoCCA because of the hot purple inkwell on the cover. Those CCSers sure turn out a good screenprint! In this case the print was by Kubby Barry, artist of one of my favorite stories in this collection. “The Tortise and the Hare” is a retelling of the fable, set at a woodsy retreat for anthropomorphic hippy homesteaders who have aged considerably since they all became friends. Though the art is rough and childlike, Kubby gives a nuanced picture of friends that have grown apart as well as a portrait of idealism gone sour.

The other editor, C.Frakes, spins a cute and creepy story with selections from “Marya and Death.” It made me want to go to her website and read all of it. I especially liked the movement the inky brushwork (?) afforded the characters.

Other highlights included Annie Murphy’s old-timey, fantastical loss n’ love story (I wanted to eat the faces of the earnest characters), and CCS instructor Rachael Gross’s intriguing pieces that look like beautiful oversized trading cards for the mysterious but practical woman.

The collection also included poems and a short story. The non-comic selections didn’t add much for me and some of the contributions seem dashed off (like Lucy Knisely’s “Girlique;” I’ve seen way better stuff on her website that are just sketches) leading to an overall uneven feeling to the collection. That’s anthologies, I guess—but I was hoping for more from such talented ladies.

The Ticking & Micrographica by Renee French

The Ticking

After hearing nonstop about this book for many months I finally picked it up, submitting to the seductive cloth cover with its pretty gilding and its little box-headed boy. I’m glad Top Shelf decided to take the sexy D&Q cover route. Not only is it pretty, I think it really goes with the timelessness of the story inside.

Some people mark the opening words of the book, “Edison Steelhead was born on the kitchen floor. His mother did not survive him,” to be chilling and set the tone of French’s graphic novel. I find the next lines to be even more striking:
“You have my face. So we’ll go away. Where nobody can see it.” Yes, what’s more horrible than being motherless is having a father that is so ashamed of himself that he is ashamed of you. And that shame is what prohibits Edison, a boy with usual features and a big mind from being supported by his father Calvin.

Like French’s The Soap Lady, this pencily-gray book could be read as a children’s tale about being different, growing up and finding one’s own way. And it works very well on that level—I think children would be charmed by Edison and the various disguises required by his father (the monkey head is especially cute) and lulled by the fairytale quality of some of the book’s elements, such as the Steelhead’s private island full of secrets for Edison to uncover and document.

As an adult, I could really take the time to both enjoy the art and read the story as a testament to people’s ability to transcend their circumstances. Edison knows that it is sad that his father couldn’t allow himself to enjoy Edison on Edison’s terms, but he doesn’t let that stop him from becoming an illustrator and living in the city. The note of hope is such a pleasant aspect—something I am looking for right now.

My favorite touch is Edison’s drawings of the things he finds. They gain in mastery as he grows up and show up again on a heartbreaking page near the end. I love the weird little diagrams that are so like real children’s drawings and somehow so unlike them.

The perfect balance of all the elements—sweetness, creepiness, melancholy and hope—make this book really special. Buy it for someone weird today!



Micrographica
This fun, tiny book, also by Top Shelf, was a drawing exercise originally done on French’s website. She made each of the drawings originally 1” x 1” and blown up for the book, the clarity of the elements is really remarkable. The story involves squirrel-like creatures and a ball of poop. What more could you ask for?

Sadly, I lost my copy at a blah restaurant in the Meatpacking District at the end of a very long walk. I hope the busboys enjoyed it.

Sounds of Your Name by Nate Powell

Oh boy, the first book of 2008. I picked this up at Half Price books in Monroeville, PA after Christmas because it was published by Microcosm and I like the cover and the art as I flipped through. Despite my copy being one of the misprints (which I found out later), the words were still legible. The art was really dynamic, if a little gray, even in the couple of stories effected by bad scanning.

Nate Powell was a 90s zine-y guy which may be why his name sounded familiar. SYN is a collection of his self-published work. The stories are mostly about dissatisfied folks, boys, girls and men, who make bad decisions and drive around. There is a lot of love that can’t be had, or was lost, by young adults in sweatshirts. To put it mildly, these are not my favorite storylines. “Wah, wah, wah,” I think. Maybe I’m too old for these.

My favorite story in the collection was “Frankenbones.” It was written by Emil Heiple, and perhaps that’s why I liked it the most. Two cats roam about and protect the bespectacled gal that has taken them in. I loved the humor and the pacing of the story and the cat with an eye patch.

I love Powell’s figures and movement. They way he incorporates the environments of the characters’ into the panels is superb as well (a wind gust, trash, cold). Still, even in comics, I need some kind of compelling narrative to pull me through and SYN just didn’t do it for me.

Last minute party

Sadly, this will not be some service journalism on how to throw together a wicked kegger in 20 minutes or less.

Happily, it is a reminder that Amy Ambulette is having a book party for her new novel How Far is the Ocean from Here. I am excited to read it, not just because she is a great writer, but because I know reading it will inspire me on to bigger and better artistic things, just like my friendship with her has. It will be like friendship in portable form-- what more could you ask for?

A note on books not finished

Recently I have had a little run of bad novel reading. Two of those books I read almost all the way through-- one sort-of sci fi and the other a 90s noir (which was just as awkward as that sounds). Both suffered from wooden dialogue and too much time inside uninteresting characters' heads. Why do I waste my time on these things when I have a million other books at my disposal, some just steps away in my cluttered bookshelves or in one of the numerous piles on the floor?

I used to think I could only have an opinion on a book if I read it all the way through. In the imaginary cocktail party of my collegiate nightmares, not only am I naked, I am out-litted too. Now that I realize that most cocktail parties require only a black dress and good balance, it is still somehow hard for me to give up on a book, no matter how wretched it is.

These books certainly helped me continue to get over that ridiculousness.

Luckily, because of MoCCA, I have been reading incredibly great comics. I rarely write about single issues here. Should I?

On top of that, a trip to a small bookstore on Court St. in Brooklyn netted three books that should be good reads, all for under $10.

The Melancholy of Anatomy: Stories by Shelley Jackson

Two years ago I read Half Life and loved it. I have been seeking Jackson’s 2002 story collection for a while now and finally, a few weeks ago, the NYPL’s one copy became available. From previous abortive attempts at purchase, I knew that the book was divided into sections mimicking the old medical idea that the bodies’ processes and aspects could be divided into four humors but I guess I wasn’t prepared to feel so lost at the organization of the stories. Maybe I am missing something because I don’t know enough about choleric, melancholic, phlegmatic and sanguine, or maybe I am missing nothing at all. Despite many passages that were pitch perfect, I couldn’t really get into the stories.

One of the perfect lines was this, in the story “Phlegm:”
Men flatter themselves they are original in admiring me. How confused they are when they find out they competition. (There is no desperation like that of a lover who has decided to do you a favor, and finds himself waiting in line.)

I think the reason that “Phlegm” works better than many of the other stories is that the narrator is a full-fledged character, which is rare in this collection. Many of the stories are about people who are in love with, feeding, or somehow harboring body parts disconnected from bodies, and the stories feel like they are more about the inherent problems with a cancer growing in the living room or a love affair with a bundle of glistening nerve fibers than the effect of such a situation on the characters, giving the bulk of the collection a fable-ish feeling. Reading through, even over time, gave me Aesop-fatigue. Nothing stuck but a vague picture of pulsating tumors and wet things in the night. There were bodies, like in Half Life, but no people to go with them.

Luckily, Jackson’s talent for wickedly on point satirical takes on various forms of writing do make an appearance (in this book, back-of-the-comic-book-marketing-speak and tracts get the treatment)—a delight for anyone who was as excited by those sections in Half Life as I was. In “Blood,” a strangely touching story that echoes the stops and starts of any good oral history showcases both the best and worst of her work in this collection. One the one hand, she makes a story about the disappearance of lower-middle class jobs for women (and the gnarly prestige and culture that went with it) in a London-ish place thought-provoking without being pedantic. On the other, the playfulness with words that marks her better writing also yielded this: “Up we went in all directions, like ferrets after a rat, in our swaddling suits, prodding the tiddlers ahead of us if we was in an area with lots of finicking veins to it, because a finger in a dike is one thing, but you can maneuver better if you can fit your whole fist in there.” Easter-eggery fun? Yes, but also kinda cheap.

I am glad I read the collection despite my modest disappointment in the stories overall. When, when, when will she have a new novel?

I have to thank the Small Beer Press crew for the head's up on iced barley tea.

Yum!

A nice write-up by Kristi Valenti on my beloved Twisted Sister anthologies.

See Note 1 for a sentence or two that could spark a million essays. Yes, a moratorium please on female-creator-anthologies with covers made up of portraits of the contributing artists. It is beyond lame.


(Via journalista)

Summer Contest Winner: Amanda Miller

Amanda likes to mix it up and submitted a photo for the contest.

Summer Contest Winner: Simon Häußle

Even though Simon went over the word count dictated in the contest, and his story is not one of fun at all, it was fun to read, just as he'd hoped it would be. He gets my respect just for writing such a long piece in English. I kept all his craaaaazy Euro-formatting for all of you to enjoy. Thanks for playing, Simon, and email me your address!

************************************************************************
No words of Mum

We where a quiet family. Even after my cousin Reni died of heart dysfunction when he was eighteen, we didn’t talk.
But we responded.
Dad had me draw one of those cards I would do then, only this time without color.
Between doing the bills he penned down what words would have the time to jump out of him in a short minute. Dad had taken a quick look at it, folding what was to be said along with the card and put it into the envelope with the black, outlined square on the front. „Nice.“ He held it up against the gaslight.
Grandma had muttered to send it off since Monday: “Condolences are not to lie around…gotta be on time with this!!”
She really compensated for the all of us.
Sometimes talking and telling steadily as slowly one after the other left the room. She would follow the last one with her, down the stairways or out to the veranda, often only with her voice. Dad rushed out, escaping to the noise of some motor. Safe.

My aunt Paula and he had been to the funeral the Friday before, taking a two hour drive. They wouldn’t stay longer than the afternoon of the burial - Reni’s father was only Dads half brother anyway.
„The food was good. Nice restaurant.“ Paula said as they arrived back home, getting out of the Pickup before the cloud of grey dust they brought with them could settle.
Dad nodding.

Fifteen minutes later he was somewhere in the fields, his suit back where it would rest most of it’s time. It was taken out only to coat his appearance at the usual occasions during the year: Baptisms, funerals, the selling of an ox.

There are worse things. Than a divorce I mean.
After it we fell even more economic when it came to losing talk.
We where a group of people, tending to do our own dishes now.
Grandma divided her gold-edge porcelain dining set among the new parties. It was three soup plates and three dinner plates for each of us.
Six times of hand painted eastern European beauty. I liked the way I could feel the tiny brushstrokes on their inside when I went over them with my fingers, all smooth.

Taking them out, she told us, now that we didn’t have children yet and weren’t married either and with her at the obstacle of falling down and breaking her neck at any time, it was better to part it like this. Our Moms and Dads where good-for-nothings anyhow and we should see that we get along by ourselves pretty soon.
Headline: “How to make new families in the 90s: Divide, not multiply.“

As long as I was looking for a new place, I was still living on the farm with Dad.
The “nices” and “goods” I had collected so far where already growing sparse company in the last year. The one I had gotten for the condolence card was the last one I had heard.

I looked at my collection like at a retrospective of one artists thrown away paintings in a museum, long after she had left for other things. The pieces chronologically beaded in my mind with dates below them as their titles.
The topic would stay the same. „Very consistent.“


A diptych of a lonely „good“ up against a mumbled „nice“ already two years old, but visited frequently, took my attention. It had the momentum of a paint by numbers conversation: „Now fill out the rest of the black and white grid around the provided center by yourself, applying your inner vision. Work with a palette of vivid, livelier colors - or use somber tones for a more realistic touch. Enjoy!“
I nodded away, somewhat tickled by all I pictured to come.

Some weeks into the summer I had found a house a few towns to the west, close to a river of clear, greenish water. Its banks, I had been told, remained unregulated. Allowing it to push its yellow sand through the grass and around the rocks lying at its borders, by the way of the small floods it caused.

I arrived in heavy rain.
Trees growing over the riverbank had their roots washed bare by the rising, fast water.
I took down the wooden sign.
My new place used to be a ballroom some years ago, housing dances for the country youth. Dad spoke of it when he talked to us about the time of being our age.
A long time ago.
But he never remembered to come back, to visit here again.

Just popping back in with a link to an interesting discussion on reviewing & criticism at newsarama by Chris Maunter. Comics is a tight-knit group, especially the small press world, so how do critics deal with writing about people they know?

The longer I hang around cons, boards and creepy back alleys the more this question applies to me. So far I take it on a case-by-case basis, erring toward the side of reviewing only strangers for my non-tryharder reviews. Either way, I always attempt to give my readers a clear picture of what the book did to/for me (here) and what its merits and demerits are (elsewhere).

***

My computer is still off in rehab. No real reviews until it returns I think.