BOOKS WE LIKED 2018: Nick Hanover, Sara L. Jewell, Jason Sacks, and Mark Stack

It’s the most wonderful time of the year. That’s right -- it’s BEST OF season when comic sites large and small churn out their lists, anointing subjective BESTS and, thereby, relegating thousands upon thousands of unlisted comics to the long box of Misfit Toys.

We here at Your Chicken Enemy are uncomfortable with these implications of creating BEST OF lists. Instead, we focus on celebrating ALL that is good in small press/self-published comics. Our site is built on an appreciation for diversity, admiration of artists, respect for the craft, and, of course, sandwiches.  

So, in lieu of the traditional BEST OF list, Publisher and EiC of YCE, Daniel Elkin, has gathered his flock of (Chicken) Enemies and asked them for their contributions to Your Chicken Enemy’s inaugural

Today’s BOOKS WE LIKED 2018 features books liked by Nick Hanover, Sara L. Jewell, Jason Sacks, and Mark Stack

Make sure to check out Tuesday's Favorites from Ryan Carey, Philippe LeBlanc, Steve Morris, and Austin Lanari.

And Monday's Favorites from Rob Clough, Kim Jooha, Alex Hoffman, and Keith Silva.

Nick Hanover: 

Cartoon Dialectics #3

By Tom Kaczynski and Clara Jetsmark

Published by Uncivilized Books

Available HERE

Cartoon Dialectics #3 looks like a humble, unobtrusive work-- it’s packaged like a zine, printed in purple, black and white with an occasional splash of yellow on somewhat thick, matte paper. But what Tom Kaczynski and Clara Jetsmark provide between its covers is powerful, invigorating stuff, connecting the dots between our society’s retromania and the rise of neo-fascism, while also acknowledging how easy it is for anyone to fall prey to the dangerous allure of nostalgia. 

The written content itself is sharp and refreshingly clear, but it’s the contrast of Kaczynski’s architect eye and Jetsmark’s borderline cubist approach to design that makes the material triumph the way it does. Even the most detailed and complex analysis in Cartoon Dialectics goes down easy because of how eye-catching and blunt the art is, like a lecture carried out by performance artists. Bold in its aesthetic and literal simplicity and paradoxically educational and surreal, Cartoon Dialectics #3 did a far better job investigating where we are now and why in its few pages than the entirety of the New York Times this year.

Vampire Horse

By Madeline McGrane

Self-published

Read It HERE

I had a hard time mustering up much enthusiasm for comics this year. Between the seemingly endless stories of sexual harassment and assault on both the mainstream and indie levels and the growing sense that we were living in the end times, I mostly wanted to do anything but read comics, let alone write about them. So whenever something popped up that felt, well, fun, it was like being thrown an oxygen mask and tank while sinking to the bottom of the sea.

Madeline McGrane’s Vampire Horse was perhaps my most unexpected comics salvation this year. Appearing on Twitter in March, and then magically reappearing on my feed at several dire points in the rest of my year, Vampire Horse provided exactly what it promised: the adventure of a horse turned into a vampire and the vampire cowgirl who befriends it. McGrane’s stark, unfussed over art is naturally relaxing but McGrane’s highly expressive character designs keep things exciting and complex, wringing far more depth and tension out what would be a one-note joke in lesser hands. Vampire Horse might prompt a reflexive snicker at first glance but read it and tell me it doesn’t feel like a lifesaver in this tire fire of a year.

An Actual Goblin

By Pete Toms

Self-published

Available HERE

I suspect that satirists and surrealists are having a particularly difficult time creating material when reality itself feels like the bleakest possible joke. So props to Pete Toms for finding a way to stay inspired, relevant and, most importantly, goddamn funny here at the end of the world with An Actual Goblin.

Like most of Toms’ work, An Actual Goblin explores the absurdity of living multiple lives at once-- work, home, and social media. In this case, that’s through the perspective of a woman fired for being a little too woke at a Medieval Times-esque gimmick restaurant, whose drunken decision to release her equine coworkers on the town results in severed digits (swiftly becoming a signature Toms motif), escalating conspiracy theories from the local authorities and unnatural partnerships between human and animal (not in the way you’re thinking, you pervert). 


What makes An Actual Goblin standout in Toms’ work and otherwise is how masterfully it strikes a balance between constant laugh out loud entertainment and heady philosophizing. An Actual Goblin is heavily detailed, but not in a cluttered way, with Toms getting humor and tension out of things as simple and subtle as t-shirts characters wear (a favorite of mine just says “TOONS”) while also providing nauseating moments of body horror, ranging from worm infestations to melting faces. Put simply, An Actual Goblin is a disturbingly accurate representation of the headspace of this rotten age, in all its terror and all its comedy.

Sara L. Jewell:

Cave Dreams 

by Carta Monir 

Published on Polygon

Read It HERE

I discovered Monir’s excellent comics for the first time this year and eagerly sought out her work across the internet. Her comics frequently interrogate or utilize the ways in which modern-day experiences are increasingly mediated or deeply influenced by digital arenas and interfaces. Cave Dreams, a recent piece published on Polygon, explores video games as liminal spaces and “imperfect mirrors” through a childhood experience of a 1991 DOS game - Magic Pockets - with its own meta-dimensional mechanic: the protagonist can jump into his pant’s pocket and enter a different dimension. Monir’s effortless line and deliberate scrolled reveal of each subsequent panel draw the reader, not coincidentally, deeper into their screens as she captures the feeling of entering a virtual world that subsequently enters you, becoming entangled somewhere deep in your subconscious. One of the Monir’s great strengths as a cartoonist is her ability to evoke a sense of what being in a virtual world feels like. It’s never more evident than in Cave Dreams, a comic that rejects the idea of “perfect safety” in any space, real or imagined. 

Flocks 

by L. Nichols 

Published by Secret Acres

Available HERE

Nichols’ memoir about growing up queer in a conservative Christian community really struck a chord with me. Flocks rejects easy answers to the question of what to do when the communities you depend on to uplift you would just as soon strike you down if they knew who you truly were. Over the course of the book, wherein Nichols depicts himself as a doll with button-eyes, he belongs to many shepherded groups (as the title might suggest) and frequently feels the discomfort of not-quite-belonging. Nichols contention at one point, that we can belong to these communities in some ways but not others, that we can take what’s good from fellowship and leave the rest behind, is deeply poignant in the context of his life, as he charts his journey from ashamed young person to happy, confident father, artist, and graduate. 

Upgrade Soul 

by Ezra Claytan Daniels 

Published by Lion Forge

Available HERE

A disturbing look at how we define human potential, Daniels' superbly drawn science fiction opus follows Hank and Molly Nonnar, an elderly couple who undergo a cutting-edge procedure in the hopes of perfecting and rejuvenating themselves. Not merely a fountain of youth or a return to halcyon days, the treatment aims to genetically “perfect” the pair in every possible way, but instead creates two horrific, alien-looking clones, whose intellectual and emotional sophistication strains the claim that they could possibly, even with the pair’s memories, be Hank and Molly any longer. What follows is a tale rife with body horror that asks uncomfortable questions about what makes us who we are, what constitutes a flaw, and what it means to achieve our “best” selves. Daniels' narrative is unsettling, engaging, and frequently emotional. His characters are fully realized and feel completely authentic. Upgrade Soul is a book that absolutely does not shy away from the metaphysically intricate ideas it introduces. 

Jason Sacks:

Adult Crash Comix

By Jim Kettner

Available HERE

Jim Kettner’s Adult Crash Comix is a revelation. A work of technical and emotional precision, this is also a moving first chapter of an intriguing graphic novel.

Kettner’s linework is excellent, precise but loose enough to keep the focus on the humanity of the characters. His use of single-color highlights is well used to accentuate key settings like the bland pleasantness of hospital waiting rooms and the suffocating closeness of grandma's house. As well, his use of full- and two-page spreads does a powerful job of accentuating important story beats.

The aspect of the book that really resonates with me is the larger story Kettner depicts.

Kettner tells about how a hospital visit to his critically ill grandmother reminds him of a terrible childhood experience. In doing so, he helps to render universal an experience most of us feel throughout our lives: the tremendous disappointments our families visit upon us and the myriad ways human weakness becomes apparent as we become more cognizant of our world. Those themes then resonate as we are flip the story in order to provide sympathy for those who disappointed us. In the inversion of experience, we are moved to have a moment of revelation about our own weaknesses. That epiphany gives Adult Crash real emotional power.

The Secret Voice

By Zack Soto

Published by Study Group Comics

Available HERE

The Secret Voice is the most fun graphic novel I read in 2018. This epic fantasy offers thrilling action, fascinating characters, and thoughtful worldbuilding. This book is an exciting page-turner, but it also delivers more than is shown on the surface.

The independent vision of creator Zack Soto is what makes this book truly special. The Secret Voice mainly focuses on the bandaged mystery man, Doctor Gallapagos, as he battles the mysterious Red College. 

Gallapagos provides the true center of this book. Readers are shown from his first moments on the page that the bandaged man is a tenacious warrior. But as Soto pulls us along in his story, he shows readers the massive costs that fighting spirit has cost this great warrior. Gallapagos is beaten down in his body, his soul, and his love life. His weaknesses make him intriguing. His inner fragility pulls the reader in and encourages empathy.

Soto’s discursive wanderings are just as compelling: he places readers into troll villages which hint at a full society. He gives us intriguing, elusive references to past battles, old broken romances, and the implications of deep emotional and physical damage. The Secret Voice treads the elusive line between an improvisational indie vision and a fun epic fantasy.

That Box We Sit On

by Richie Pope

Self-Published

Available HERE

When I was in elementary school, my friends and I once found an odd box in the middle of a country field. We spent hours debating the box, its importance and where it came from. Ultimately the mystery evaporated when a neighbor told us it was just a piece from a milking machine. 

Richie Pope’s “That Box We Sit On” takes a similar experience and spins a beguiling comic from it. This smart mini presents a dialogue which seems to be about a mysterious box in the middle of a field but which actually is about friendship and the power of imagination.

Pope delivers his comic as six-panel grids which provide a metronomic beat to the conversation between two friends as they throw out ideas about the box’s composition. That rhythm gives the book its backbone and its sense of warmth, as the friends show their obvious affection for each other, share a few laughs, and go down tangents such as their love for spicy sunflower seeds.

“That Box” seems simple, but it is as complicated as the relationship between two friends. That emotional resonance makes this a memorable, powerful work of comics art.

Mark Stack:

Battery Acid Chapter 1 

Written by J Doyle, art by Y Zhou 

Self-Published

Find Out More HERE

The sports comic is bigger than the superhero comic from a global perspective. Unfortunately, the sports comic is not as big of a figure in the American comics industry, and thus the biggest successes in the genre in the States are with imported series such as Haruichi Furdudate’s Haikyu!. As with a lot of blockbuster comics, there’s a particular idiom that that series works within with the successful elements coming from the unique application of character dynamics. Battery Acid, a self-published North-American comic, is certainly working within that Japanese idiom while also striving to add dimension to the antagonistic relationship between the two players who lead the book. The first chapter of this comic sets up a larger ongoing, establishing the abusive dynamic between the timid Hasegawa and the hotheaded Ono when the former gives up a game-winning hit in a key baseball game before flashing forward two years. Visually, this comic sets itself apart from its North American peers with its deft visual vocabulary that, while lacking somewhat in detail at times, always accentuates the strengths of the book through the dynamic staging of the leads. The excitement for this book, functionally a standalone as a first chapter even as it leaves threads open to being developed in later chapters, comes in the way these two have changed since that important game. Their interactions tell a story of lingering fear and regret between them that will need to be resolved in order for them to create a functional team. It’s a potent cocktail.

Crimes 

by Kelsey Wroten 

Published by Pyrite Press

Available HERE

There probably isn’t enough said about how the cover, as more than a marketing tool, serves as the first taste of a comic. The cover for Crimes presents a melancholy so overbearing that it depresses at the onset even as the warm colors invite you in. You want to keep looking at it, but all it does is make you feel sadder. That’s the case for protagonist Willa as she falls for Bas, her best friend Simon’s younger girlfriend. Bas is at once extremely cool and unattainable from her work as an artist and detached attitude. Her aloofness vexes Willa as the two get closer as she remains unreadable with the poor girl worrying about what she is and isn’t projecting onto her. Willa, shaped by an upbringing in which her father seemed to go out of his way to prove that he was smarter than a child and then criticizing her in the next breath, sees herself in stark black and white. She is either good or bad, and there is a tremendous degree of shame wrapped up in her attraction to Bas (who, for her part, is much more comfortable with her sexuality, not using labels or attempting to define it within herself, than Willa who struggles to sputter out that she isn’t attracted to men). The crimes of the title may very well refer to the moments of intimacy between Willa and Bas as they embark on an affair that is at first intimate and suddenly sexual, leaving Willa to worry that her pursuing something that might make her feel good is a sin. As Bas asks Willa in the form of a poem, “You keep portraits of great thinkers by your bed/Black and white/Why are there no portraits of great thinkers in color?” The reader is prepared to see the color in Willa’s black and white world as the cover prepares them to read Willa and Bas’ hair as the same shade of platinum blonde and the colors of the beach that the finale is staged at as warmer than the events might indicate even as they are not visible within the pages themselves.

Tinderella 

by M.S. Harkness 

Published by Kilgore Books

Available HERE

Much of Tinderella, as the name would suggest, follows Harkness through her (assumedly) autobiographical history of dating app hook-ups like she’s a horny Scott McCloud in a world full of inhospitable dick. The range of style found in this book really does recall the range shown in the quintessential comics textbook Understanding Comics, but with an exciting application into storytelling that even McCloud couldn’t quite achieve with works like The Sculptor. Harkness shifts the depiction of herself radically over the course of the book to fit the tone of her latest misadventure, almost always appearing a shade more “cartoony” than her scene partners. It’s a tremendous breath of fresh air to follow a woman who at times presents herself as gross and miserable without having to take brutal shots at herself to almost apologize or contextualize the portrayal. This is something men often get to do in their own work, but practically never this potently self-aware, good-humored, and considered. Harkness’ skill as a storyteller truly shines late in the book in a capstone sequence where the events of Wrestlemania X-Seven’s match between Vince and Shane McMahon are played out before being followed by a harrowing flashback to Harkness’ mother attempting to get her and her brother’s name’s changed following her ex-husband’s charge of sexual assault. It’s a bravura sequence as the absurdly presented story of righteous child versus scumbag father plays out with the former overcoming while the flashback to court shows him succeeding for the moment. A lesser work would play that wrestling match for catharsis. Instead, Harkness embraces the mess of emotions found in the story and the denial of a similar resolution in her own life. Expect to see Harkness on lists like this every year she puts out a book.

Black Hole, Son: Mark O. Stack on the Recursive Narrative of Charles Burns' BLACK HOLE

(Editor's Note: As the first post of a new year, it's only fitting that I publish something looking inward at something from the past. This piece by Mark O. Stack began as a Twitter conversation I had with Mark when I saw that he was finally reading Charles Burns' classic OGN, BLACK HOLE. Mark was instantly captured by Burns' recursive narrative technique in this book. At first, I wanted to see Mark's reaction to how Burns chose to end Black Hole, then I goaded him into writing the longer piece I have the pleasure of presenting below.)

It’s common practice for children growing up in the Pacific Northwest to receive a degree of wilderness survival training by the time they’ve left elementary school. The region is thick with trees, making it easy for those who are unprepared to become lost in the woods. If one doesn’t know their way out, they’re likely to find themselves passing by the same landmarks over and over as they get no closer to their destination. 

The teenage protagonists of Charles Burns’ Black Hole spend much of their time lost and in the woods, although it is the lovelorn Chris who holds the distinction of being literally lost in the woods as she finds herself without the guide she previously relied on. When her lover Rob disappears, she wanders uncertain of her path or destination. Burns wanders, too, as he often doubles back to revisit key moments in the narrative from new perspectives that serve to illuminate character and develop arcs.

This technique adds a fullness to the work that might not otherwise be present given the myopic perspectives of the two central figures, Keith and the aforementioned Chris. These characters’ perspectives may be myopic, but it is important to emphasize that the book itself is not, due to its habit of doubling back in time. Keith and Chris can not see past their own lives, never even looking deeply into the interior lives of their romantic partners. Chris in particular speaks about Rob predominantly in terms of her need for him, and Keith’s view of Chris is colored by his “nice guy” projection on her as the perfect girl for him. 

The book opens with Keith passing out during a biology class dissection as the universe more or less opens up before him to reveal his path forward. He recognizes Chris as the only student in the class who isn’t laughing at him, and this begins the development of his idealized vision of her as his soulmate. The whole sequence happens across several pages. However, it’s a scant few panels later when we revisit the scene from Chris’ perspective. She feels a worry for the boy (she is a nice girl when she isn’t buckling under extreme stress), but it isn’t anything deeper than that. A moment that means a lot to one person ends up being just that, a moment, to another. A message (it would be presumptuous to call it the message) is made clear— this isn’t going to be a story about this boy “getting” this girl.

Burns continues returning to events from new perspectives, giving readers Chris and Keith’s perspective of her late-night swim that reveals the physical deformity she’s developed as the result of a fictional sexually transmitted disease. Readers get her perspective as she undresses and swims, they get Keith’s as he hears the story moments later before watching her undress, and they get Chris’ point of view again as she finds out about the accidental unveiling of her previously unknown condition. These scenes don’t merely flow from one directly into the next. There is material in-between, but the book more or less creates a closed loop in a stretch of pages that makes that section the whole story of that one moment. It may have been frustrating for readers of Black Hole as the book was initially serialized to find themselves constantly going back in time to re-explore events, but that structure makes the book sing as a graphic novel collection. 

This technique is not isolated to exploring large moments, either, as Burns uses it to illuminate minor scenes as well. Chris lies drunk in a bed, remembering/dreaming about her missing beau, and for one panel we see that Keith has placed a hand on her stomach before she drifts back into a symbolically loaded dream. That moment where Chris registers Keith’s “warm and needy” hand rubbing her stomach is exactly that— a single moment. What’s happening around it, her dreams of Keith and the beach that she feels fated to return to, are given importance. The moment plays out from Keith’s perspective in the next chapter and this time it comprises an entire page, revealing Keith’s desire to comfort Chris before his hopes of a potential romantic connection are dashed by her continued fixation on Rob. Keith comes off as kind of creepy from both perspectives, but it’s a different kind of creepy. From Chris’ perspective, it’s easy to interpret Keith’s hand on her as a potentially sexual touching with her description of his “warm and needy” hand. From Keith, though, we learn that he thought Chris was sick and was attempting to comfort her without an awareness of physical contact being a boundary crossing act. Intentions and interpretation are made clear. Keith sees himself as coming to the rescue. while Chris reads him as being needy and almost pathetic. Both are accurate, and that single moment becomes all the richer for that shading of the gap between Keith’s intentions and Chris’ interpretations. 

As a collection, Black Hole is a work of art opening up and displaying itself rather than simply guiding the reader through a plot. Things happen, they spring logically out of the moments that come before them, but there’s no sense that it’s necessarily going anywhere heading into the back half. Unfortunately, the final stretch of the book does not maintain this graceful act as Burns’ storytelling technique of doubling back to share different perspectives on events are used for the purpose of merely illuminating… plot. 

In the final quarter of the book, Keith has been allowing a group of physically deformed “sick kids” who have been living in the woods to squat in a home that he has been watching for a couple of family friends. As he smokes weed in the garage, he hears the sound of something like firecrackers before going inside to see that multiple people have been shot to death. The sequence is unsettling as readers experience Keith’s confusion along with him. The push-in on the bullet hole in a dead boy’s cheek is disorienting and enthralling in a way familiar to the experience of getting high and hyper-focusing on a detail. The confusion is sold, but, for once, the randomness of an event as large as this one is distancing rather than enhancing. The reader doesn’t know what could have spurred this on as they haven’t been made privy to the lead-up. For once, it feels like the reader has missed something important. 

The book then shifts perspective late in the game to the little-seen nor heard from Dave, another sick kid who is revealed later to have been infatuated with Chris and has been attempting to distance her from friends and loved ones in order to seduce her. The reader isn’t granted his internal monologue as they have been when following other characters, but they watch him as he collects a bucket of chicken and murders his best friend before contemplating suicide. It’s jarring to suddenly follow a “new” character, deprived of any insight into his thoughts as we would have been granted with any other character in the first half of Black Hole, and track him on this atypically violent journey. 

Keith learns from a sick kid about the events of the shooting in detail, clarifying how it happened and how some people managed to escape it. Finally, the reader learns from Chris that Dave had been plying her with booze in an attempt to woo her before making a confession that he loves her and — brandishing a gun — asserting that no one else can have her. It’s a big statement from what had been a minor character of previously unknown motivation. 

The technique of circling around an event ends up having to do the heavy lifting of showing the readers how and why things are happening. Unlike in earlier segments, where the reader already knows the answer to why things occur, as they spring out of already established elements of the characters’ personalities and relationships, here we’re thrust into the chaos of a moment, shown the character who perpetrated it, see the moment as it plays out, and then find out about the motivation that had not been established prior. It all adds up to a logical turn of events, but the goal of art is not merely to convey a logical turn of events. Nothing new is learned about the characters we have followed throughout the book as they are now artificially pushed into directions that then carry them to the end of their journey. 

And it is worth noting that the book had earlier deployed what appeared to be random violence to great effect as Chris’ boyfriend Rob is murdered in the woods after leaving her for the night. As he dies, a small mouth on his chest (a result of his status as a sick kid) bemoans that things between him and Chris were never going to work out. It’s the tragic pay-off to dreams and previous messages from the mouth that had foretold an inevitably doomed outcome. It works thematically on a level that Dave’s murder of the sick kids simply does not. 

After the shooting, Keith runs off with Eliza, a woman he has fallen in love with, to see the sights of the Southwest that she had regaled him with, and Chris returns to the beach where she had spent her last perfect moment with Rob as she considers whether or not she can move on and return to her old life. Yet, these are not destinations that the characters couldn’t have reached without the shooting as the instigator. Keith’s desire to be with Eliza and escape his town had already been established. The importance of that beach to Chris was given a lot of time to develop. Everyone could have made their choices to head off into the unknown without the deaths of several teenagers as an instigator. Chris’ discomfort with Keith’s attempts at affection could have pushed her out of the house (having already decided to return to the beach eventually as she dreamed drunk in bed with Keith), just as Keith’s chance meeting with a happier Eliza at the grocery store was the true catalyst for him to run off with her.

The storytelling technique that had previously made the book so full of life and had given it a widened perspective here ends up creating a greater air of artificiality that may not have been the case had the details of Dave’s “courtship” of Chris been made known previously. In trying to piece together the chain of events leading to an instance of mass murder, an event that is, of a certain scale, alien to the pages that preceded it, the story and the reader momentarily lose track of character. Thus the reader ends up lost in the woods trying to discern the trees when the book had been guiding them to observe the forest. Whether or not the reader can find their way out of this tangle depends on how well they’ve ingrained Burns’ instruction on how best to read the book prior to that point. To disengage with the narrative when it reveals the machinery that drives it is a natural response. If this momentary loss of grace is enough to send the reader’s attention elsewhere, escaping from the black hole as the protagonists’ journeys reach their fateful end, then that is a fair outcome.

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Mark O. Stack is a comics writer based in rural California. You can find out more about his comics work at markostack.com. He is currently preparing a comics project for a crowd-funding campaign in the Spring.

The Vast Possibilities of the Small Press

This week's Tiny Pages Made of Ashes from Comics Bulletin

WE ALL WISH FOR DEADLY FORCE

By Leela Corman

Published by Retrofit Comics

Available HERE

My friend Megan Purdy and I talked about We All Wish for Deadly Force for three hours before I’d even read it. She was working on a review (which turned out quite well) and wanted to talk it out to get a better idea of what there was for her to say about the book. I like talking things out; fielding questions and going on tangents is an essential part of me finding out what is or isn’t there. So I asked Megan questions and the most interesting things she said were about the book’s design and how the collection of shorts was organized beautifully. I must be easily influenced, because I have to say that upon reading it, the organization of this collection immediately stood out to me even after what must have been a couple months.

There’s no table of contents in this book and there very well shouldn’t be. This isn’t a collection designed for a reader to thumb around the various comics in order of shortest to longest. Like a museum’s collection is curated and organized into what will hopefully be the most effective delivery for visitors, this collection guides you through it with purpose. The names and details change as the line between semiautobio and autobio is erased and redrawn, but a larger narrative develops because it’s the same voice singing the songs.

Corman’s first comic in this collection, “The Wound That Never Heals,” is part medical pamphlet and part confessional about the effects of the long-term effects of PTSD that the author has lived with following the death of her daughter. Corman illustrates the concept of hypervigilance as the titular wound that never heals; it’s a compelling image onto which even readers who haven’t experienced PTSD can project their own personal experiences whether they’d like to or not. It’s a world-ender.

Hypervigilance and triggers become an integral part of the collection as longer pieces are punctuated by a strip centered on a moment in time when the author’s grief was triggered so that the reader remains vigilant as well. The belly-dancing stories in this collection live side-by-side with Corman recalling a traumatic event at a grocery store because the price coincides with the date it occured. It’s the gift of Corman’s cartooning that made me feel I could understand the emotions she was expressing, but it’s the strength of this organization simulating the effects of triggers and hypervigilance that made them intimately real.

The story that concludes the collection, “The Book of the Dead,” is a great work on its own about the necessary sacrifices made by forbearers that create distance between them and their children. The Holocaust weighs heavy on Corman’s family tree, having inflicted a wound that never heals even as each generation responds to it in their own necessarily different way. That weight carries over into Corman’s work as she playfully questions what makes someone a good/bad Jew or ponders what the living have to offer the dead for their sacrifices. “The Book of the Dead” serves as a statement (not final, never final) about Corman’s use of art as an offering to the living and the dead. It carries an additional weight after these questions have been intimated for the reader to unconsciously consider in the previous stories. This final comic can not simply be boiled down to Corman reacting to one or even two things after the reader has been presented with a rich portrait of her life and personal history. It could not come at the beginning. Placing it there would be tantamount to instructing the reader how to interpret the following comics rather than encouraging them to create connections between them that are then illuminated further by the final comic after the initial experience has already been forged. It’s the sum of all the stories; the autobios, the belly dancers, the extended metaphors.

Corman spills blood on the page in order to commune, and her book speaks to the reader. A short comic exploring trauma through the visual metaphor of a forest being contained inside of someone might be inscrutable if presented in isolation, but one understands it as this book is largely a conversation between Corman and the reader about reactions to trauma. There is no forward, no afterword. All the words for understanding Corman are in the work itself and it’s up to the reader to listen.

-- MARK STACK @MarkOStack

KATZINE

By Katriona Chapman

Published by Tomatito Press

Available HERE

In his short story “The Dual Personality of Slick Dick Nickerson,” American Naturalist writer Frank Norris explores the fragility of human personality. In this tale, the titular character, a Methodist Preacher, becomes a cut-throat pirate after suffering a blackout due to heat stroke, only to later return to his preacher ways after a blow to the head. It’s the kind of story that makes you wonder how we define who we are as it points to the idea that no matter how sure we are of ourselves, that “self” is fleeting; we are constantly evolving.

I look back at the cock-sure, punk kid that I was in the 80s and I have no idea who he was. He has given way to a softer, kinder, more understanding and fearful man in the year 2017. I’m the same person, yet I am not as I was.

Who will I be tomorrow?

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the tenuous nature of identity, especially as it relates to the relationship between an artist and their art. If art is a fundamental expression of the self, but that “self” is ephemeral, then what is the lasting meaning of all artistic endeavor?

Strangely then, as if on cue, British cartoonist Katriona Chapman sent me copies of her softly-rendered, solidly-produced autobio zine series, Katzine. At first I wasn’t really sure what to make of these. In page after page of subdued and washed graphite drawings suffused with meticulously hand lettered text, Chapman presents herself. She does this not only through straight-up facts about who she “is” and what her life consists of as if part of a get-to-know-you type interview, but also by stepping back and documenting her interactions with her life, specifically her world travels and the people she encounters along the way.

As a person, I was initially uncomfortable with the forthrightness of Chapman’s presumption that her life is important enough to bear such scrutiny and light. I was worried that she was giving truth to a self that, for all extents and purposes, is a lie, a construct, mutable and inconsistent.

But as a reader I was pulled in, awash in this artist’s understanding of herself as it stood in the moment of creation, and how her lens allows for a particularity of perception. For example, in Katzine issue #4, Chapman uses a 12 panel page featuring aspect-to-aspect transitions to indicate how quickly the days go by on her vacation. Chapman chooses to show particular things in each panel give a sense of place, but also give a sense of a single perceptive lens. The choices indicate a particular point-of-view that “becomes” in the moment of making that choice.

It is as if the primacy of the self, the fundamental underpinning of so many autobio comics, became secondary to the presentation of information that reveals an understanding. While certainly you learn about “who” Katriona Chapman is through the pages of Katzine, her “self” is a cipher for decoding experience in the larger sense of understanding perception. The act of mimicking experience through her art allows her to be the person she becomes. In effect, living life and transferring those moments into a method of conveyance transforms not only that experience, but the self itself.

While I assume Katzine is not meant to answer questions of the lasting meaning of artistic endeavor, through it Chapman explores the nature of the artists.  And perhaps this is what makes all art important — how it relates to the individual. It functions as a lens that allows us all to peer at the minutiae of life. Katzine points to the fact that it’s not just the sum of experience that creates the person, it’s the perspective one uses to both make sense of those moments and the stories we convey afterwards that make the self.

And that is pretty powerful stuff. I’m glad that Katzine exists and that Katriona Chapman felt the need to share her “self” as it stands.

The world looks a lot brighter to me now that I’ve looked through this lens.

-- DANIEL ELKIN @DanielElkin

SEAGRAM

By David Biskup

Available HERE

David Biskup’s Seagram opens with a fellow walking in front of Mark Rothko’s painting Black on Maroon and taking a bunch of pills.  His blurred silhouette — another veritable black on maroon — haunts the pages that follow, as do many other things.  When reading up on the Seagram murals both after and during my experience, one of Jones’ descriptions of Black on Maroon in this piece stuck out.  Referring to the window-pane-like maroon shapes in the painting, Jones mentions how one might expect that “it ought to allow the mind egress.”  And of course, the same can be said of the past.

I cannot fathom what PTSD must be like for those whom it inflicts.  It acts as a real haunting; a master of ceremonies lies dormant in your mind, taking their cue to conjure not from you, but from the way light reflects from across the room, or a particular smell of a passerby, or as in the subject of this book, the sound of a ripped dress.

Seagram is a direct, unambiguous comparison between the restoration of a brutally un-esoteric painting and the rehabilitation of Biskup’s wife on her journey to cope with PTSD.  As such, it occurred to me that this work might feel ham-fisted to some; but, despite the apparent convenience of the metaphor (and the clumsy way that Biskup emphatically gestures at the book’s end towards the chance meeting between dealing with his wife and picking up a Rothko biography), it is perhaps the most promising gateway into understanding why Biskup is able to dig deep in these pages.  The crudest question you might come away from this work with is, I think, the right question:

Why bother?

In Seagram, Biskup makes a conscious decision to include the pages in which Rothko sets up to commit suicide.  While in one way it functions simply to display the tragically serendipitous arrival of the Seagram collection at the Tate gallery on the very same day as Rothko’s suicide, it also stands in serious contrast to the main thread of the book in which Biskup tries, unflinchingly, to help his wife continue her life.

The answer to, “why bother?” as Biskup presents it, is certainly not, “because this shit is easy.”  His wife’s trauma, whether things are falling apart or improving, is presented on the page in a striking fashion.  The initial trigger of her trauma is presented as fragments of relevant memories, haphazardly mixed with increasingly obtuse echoes of themselves, which then fade out into juxtaposed evocations of Rothko’s work.  The effect is an appropriate one in which it feels like not only has the dam broken, but some semblance of meaning has been lost.  The rest of his wife’s struggle -- save for a moment of peace with a cigarette and the empty question of what the hell is supposed to come next -- is presented in this fashion.  Rothko achieves a powerful effect with these layouts: he makes the reader feel as if -- both in spite of and because of the frenetic visual structure -- the reader has a better grasp on what’s going on than the people in the story.

Meanwhile, Black on Maroon, a work I would not have thought about twice if I had looked at it three times prior,  suddenly feels imbued with a great deal of meaning.  A painting that initially smacked of a knee-jerk restrictive definition of art (“art?  But I could paint that!”), is contextualized not just by the inclusion of Rothko’s fate, but also by the juxtaposition of reductive cartoonish exploits within the painting’s sub-particles (via Bertha the Barium Ion) with the much more sombre Biskup family tale.  In Seagram, Black on Maroon comes out feeling oddly humanized.

Compared to the obvious fragility of art (grab a pencil and you can literally just destroy invaluable things), the fragility of a human is something that permeates their entire existence, both the things unseen and those pieces of them that stretch outward into the world through experience.  Moreover, fragility is shared.  One of the reasons Biskup’s depiction of his wife’s trauma does not feel out of place or out of turn is because he depicts his own perception of the situation in the identical style to the traumatic episode itself.  Once trauma is conjured, the spell is not kind enough to keep to a single mind. Biskup is careful to depict his wife’s experience on a continuum with his own.  As a result, a book built on a tenuous metaphor succeeds at both of that metaphor’s ends, helping readers find life in an inaccessible work, and meaning in a common struggle.

-- AUSTIN LANARI @AustinLanari