Becoming What You Already Are: Matt Vadnais on BLOOD AND DRUGS by Lance Ward

Nietzsche described two conditions relevant to fiction that I find myself talking about a lot when I talk about comics. First, he suggested that we live in a “world of becoming” where nothing is a single thing because everything is always in the process of becoming something else. Second, he asserted that the purpose of tragedy is to allow safe passage into and out of the Dionysian world of intoxication, mania, madness, and formlessness that is usually held at bay by the Apollonian world of order, fixed identity, and sober daylight. While one could be forgiven for being skeptical of such claims given Nietzsche’s personal relationship with the Dionysian, his Birth of Tragedy suggests that Dionysian tragedy allows us to better negotiate our Apollonian lives by excising our Dionysian impulses. Like a lot of my favorite comics of the last few years, Lance Ward’s Blood and Drugs contemplates a character attempting to emerge from the realms of madness and addiction; like a lot of my favorite writers, Ward depicts a world of becoming where everything and everyone is in-process. However, unlike many of the comics I am thinking about –Liu’s Monstress and Ferris’s My Favorite thing is Monsters, for example – Blood and Drugs fits squarely in the genre of realism.

Realism is the invisible genre, supposedly guided by no rules or conventions beyond depicting the world as it is. Upon closer inspection, though, realism does offer rules that tend to reinforce the notion that things are what they are, often for implicitly political reasons because definitions tend to come from those who have power: criminals are inherently bad, wealth is inherently desirable, and on and on as definitions extend to race and gender. Realism is less prepared for things that are defined – always already, to borrow wording from postmodern theory – as being in the process of becoming other things. In the context of stories about recovery – despite the number of memoirs and support groups suggesting that recovery is an ongoing and unending process – realism as a genre exerts pressure for a story to settle on one side or the other of the question of whether or not a character is an addict or a recovered addict. Though Blood and Drugs adheres to realism by setting the story of the main character, Buster, getting clean and returning to the art world in a very real Minnesota, Ward complicates the genre in a few important ways that allow its characters to exist in a liminal state simultaneously deserving of the claim to a fixed identity but also very much on the way to that identity.

Ward conjoins the story of Buster’s recovery from addiction and the injury that derailed his career as an artist to the story of his roommate – trans woman Nance – and her transition; though Nance is presented to the reader, immediately and always, as a woman, her identity as a woman is complicated by those around her. Her transition is blocked by insurance companies and complicated by depression; she begins the story living in the group home with Buster. It is only because the group home continues to misgender her that she is Buster’s roommate; Ward shows Buster struggling to recognize Nance as she is and desires to be understood. Like Buster’s recovery, Nance’s gender identity is depicted as paradoxical; she is simultaneously always a woman and always in the process of being understood and treated as a woman. 

A second way that Ward uses realism to depict paradoxes of identity involves his formal decision to follow the 12 Step Program as a table of contents. Each section takes its name from one of the steps of recovery; importantly, though, these titles are all rendered in the past tense, asserting the step has been completed even as the chapters themselves demonstrate ways in which the steps are far from finished. By framing each chapter as a completed step that is also indicative of the need for additional work, Ward frames being recovered as a process dependent on the continual acknowledgment of one’s addiction. Like the recovery process itself, Buster’s narrative begins with the story of the hand injury that put his comics career on hold after initial success which then led to an escalating addiction on pain killers that cost him his wife and family. Beyond framing the narrative at the beginning of the recovery process, Ward’s choice to show Buster telling the story of his addiction in a past-tense chapter titled “Admitted We were Powerless” reveals that the identities of addict and recovered addict are both about transformation and process and that the two identities remain coterminous even as one, forever, completes the process of being the latter.

This chapter also does something else. By establishing Buster’s addiction as part of a different change in identity – from one who makes art to one who no longer makes art other than to sell for drugs – Ward sets readers up to pay attention to ways that even that change in identity is a process. Throughout the comic, Buster is recognized as the Buster who makes comics even as he no longer identifies as that man. The title of the comic we are reading also refers to a comic that Buster made about his experience of addiction, one that readers see with different margins and slightly different art, inside the pages of Blood and Drugs. The story of Ward’s Blood and Drugs is also about the long road to publication for Buster’s very different Blood and Drugs.

Perhaps most importantly, the art of Ward’s Blood and Drugs renders Buster’s world in a style that rhymes with Buster’s description of his post-accident artistic difficulties; because his drawing hand was damaged, he consistently asserts that he can’t draw and struggles with precision. Ward’s art, though perhaps a bit more precise than the pages we see of Buster’s, is likewise comic strip-y and often unrealistic. While both artists demonstrate a tremendous amount of talent and intentionality in terms of composition and panel layout, neither art styles emphasize technique. Beyond providing a perfect conduit for depicting the Dionysian world as one that imbues the Apollonian in the way that Buster’s Minnesota of busses and group homes exists in and amongst the middle-class city where I was born – we both bought music at Electric Fetus, for example – the shared art styles imply a lack of distance between Buster and Ward that would move the story from being real to being true.

Because another rule of realism is that theme is more fully tied to plot than it might be in other ostensibly more experimental genres, I am hesitant to talk about the conclusion to any of the characters’ journeys other than to say that I found them immensely satisfying and earned. In keeping with the other ways that Ward complicates the realistic impulse to show things in a fixed state, however, it matters that the comic ends in a way that does not undermine the suggestion that the story isn’t actually over. In any case, Blood and Drugs is a rare bit of realism that simultaneously attempts to tell a real story while also explaining exactly how and why it appears as it does on the page.

When it comes to stories of recovery, claims of honesty are probably safe and, therefore, nearly meaningless criticism. However, I remain convinced that Blood and Drugs is one of the most honest comics I’ve read in years, particularly in the ways that Ward manages to show not only the real world but the rules by which he and Buster are creating and negotiating those rules, rules that, in every page of both versions of Blood and Drugs, forward a kind of realism that would appeal to Nietzsche as much as it did to me, a reader much more accustomed to Law and Order and other, less experimental, depictions of reality. 

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Matt Vadnais has taught college literature and creative writing classes for twenty years. He is the author of All I Can Truly Deliver and a contributor at covermesongs.com. For more comics coverage and the occasional tweet about Shakespeare, follow him @DoctorFanboi. For short takes on longboxes, subscribe to his channel of video essays. 

Death as a Political Mission: Matt Vadnais on FUTURE CORPSE by Eva Müller

In the Future, We are Dead, Eva Müller’s astonishingly morbid treatment of anxiety, artfully avoids narrative and conflict in an effort to thwart futurity and the certainty that any life lived as a linear progression of events must conclude with death. While her most recent comic Future Corpse bears a title that would suggest similar preoccupations and stalling tactics – and it is certainly marked by the same anxiety that permeates In the Future, We are Dead,  including a scene in which Müller graphically and painfully swallows a Japanese anxiety snake – the game has changed. Built from even smaller and increasingly narrative-resistant snippets than its thematic cousin, Future Corpse attempts to solve the problem of futurity by reconfiguring death in socio-economic terms, positioning death as the ultimate defeat of capitalism.

Part of this is punk rock, an aesthetic so woven into about a third of the art and subject matter of the book that there is a pierced-tongue-in-cheek quality to this suggestion. However, the assertion that we (those of us interested in escaping the surly hands of an economic system based on a zero-sum game) will finally win when we are dead also comes off as earnest, particularly in the context of Müller’s last book. If obfuscation, denial, and the meta-creation of a terrific comic weren’t enough to soften the blow of knowing that, eventually, the future is death, why not focus on the fact that the future at least promises an escape from menial labors and the slings and arrows of outrageous economic inequity? Clearly, given the snake swallowing that occupies a very important segment of the comic, this tactic isn’t a viable long term option, but it makes Future Corpse a satisfying coda to In the Future – one that displays a wider variety of art styles, ranging from poster layouts and something approaching one-point perspective realism to nostalgic figure drawing and even a black and white motion rendering of a Roomba vacuuming what may well be a deserted house – that offers an alternative to (or at least an alternative form of) denial.
            
The image of a Roomba vrooming about a house, passing in front of what appears to be a stone animal, is mostly unexplained; juxtaposed with a very funny series of panels in which Marx buys groceries, the Roomba page seems to represent robotic labor, particularly in the absence of humans on account of their inevitable death, as the end (or at least inevitable conclusion) of capitalism. Perhaps this is the real difference between this terrific comic and Müller’s last (very similarly titled and themed) terrific comic: the narrative bits composing In The Future were framed as thoughtful distractions where, here, even if they do some of the same work, they are taken seriously on their own merit. The threads that stitch these scenes together may look a lot like the anxiety snake she eventually swallows, but they are also the threads of an argument about labor.          

Both scenes – the snake and the Roomba – are depicted in black and white, drained of the brilliant colors that mark the sections depicting Müller becoming a better punk and Marx becoming a better consumer. The connection between anxiety and the image of the person-less labor might undermine my reading of the comic as thinking about that absence as an improvement. However, it’s worth considering anxiety as a generative process: the comic appears to be likening anxieties about a labor-less future and one that ends in death, not necessarily condemning either outcome. In any case, both scenes are united by more than color or the lack thereof: both are studies in motion and stillness.          

While Future Corpse is as occupied by anxiety and trepidation as Müller’s last book, that anxiety itself is reframed slightly here as anticipation. This book is framed by images as ideology including the aggressive and potentially naïve sloganeering of punk patches. However, some of the most exuberant pro-death rhetoric is featured on pages that are laid out to resemble Communist propaganda posters, drawing attention to the relationship between the word corpse and a corps. The comic configures our shared futurity as joining a force for the betterment of the world. Even if this doesn’t prevent – or perhaps induces or is akin to – the author swallowing the anxiety snake, the suggestion that we will do our most important work when we are no longer capable of working at all is one that lingers in the belly like an ingested serpent.

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Matt Vadnais has taught college literature and creative writing classes for twenty years. He is the author of All I Can Truly Deliver and a contributor at covermesongs.com. For more comics coverage and the occasional tweet about Shakespeare, follow him @DoctorFanboi. For short takes on longboxes, subscribe to his channel of video essays. 

Kickstart Your Part: BIRDCAGE BOTTOM BOOKS 2019

Birdcage Bottom Books is running a Kickstarter for its 2019 publications. This small press has now been around for about a  decade now but their mission statement remains the same: help incredible cartoonists who may be flying under the radar get a wider audience. 

They've published some pretty amazing books in the past and this Kickstarter seems to indicate they are continuing in that tradition.

For 2019. they are featuring books by Max Clotfelter, Eva Müller, and Lance Ward. 

MAX CLOTFELTER'S ROOFTOP STEW

Rooftop Stew collects a plethora of Max Clotfelter’s depraved comics, both fictional and autobiographical, blending ‘60s psychedelic underground comic sensibility with Southern style debauchery. Debuting at Small Press Expo (SPX) in September. 

EVA MÜLLER'S FUTURE CORPSE

Future Corpse collects new short works by Eva Müller covering themes of feminism, anxiety, punk rock, immortality, labor, and robotic vacuums. This should serve as a palette cleanser between last year’s “In The Future, We Are Dead” and her current book about working/labor. Debuting at MoCCA in April.

LANCE WARD'S BLOOD AND DRUGS

Blood and Drugs is the story of people on the fringes of society and how a single poor decision changed one man’s life forever. Buster struggles against his heroin addiction, his floundering career in comics and with human relationships in a search for redemption. Debuting at Small Press Expo (SPX) in September.

CHECK OUT THE KICKSTARTER HERE.

Anxiety as Timelessness: Matt Vadnais reviews IN THE FUTURE, WE ARE DEAD by Eva Müller

In Don DeLillo’s novel White Noise, college professor J.A.K. Gladney adopts a simple but radical philosophy in response to his profound fear of death: because all plots end in death, he strives for a life free from such literary entanglements. For the first twenty chapters of the book, the strategy works. Nothing that Gladney reports or observes in one chapter creates tension that follows him or his makeshift family into the next. Though the episodes are numbered, they resist the consequentialism of chapters; the days pass but they do not accrue. In the second section of the book, however, DeLillo disrupts Gladney’s routines and defense mechanisms by introducing an airborne toxic event that demands a single, extended chapter. Even after the weather changes, the threat passes, emergency management teams leave, the college town returns to its normal state of affairs, and DeLillo returns to shorter chapters, Gladney is no longer capable of seeing or describing his life in disconnected, isolated moments freed from causation; despite his best intentions, Gladney cannot help but acknowledge the passing of time as a narrative. He begins to plan and scheme, like any other protagonist, as he finds himself at the center of a more traditional story complete with a rising action, climax, and dénouement. Gladney seeks a means of actively confronting his fear of death at precisely the same pace that DeLillo succumbs to the conventions of the novel as a literary genre. 

Eva Müller’s fabulous poltergeist of a book, In the Future, We are Dead, makes no such concessions. Featuring an ostensibly autobiographical character who is every bit as anxious about and obsessed with death as DeLillo’s protagonist, Müller’s collection of nine “stories” – linked in rumination and obsession but neither by chronological nor narrative logic – successfully walls itself off from her own actual death by housing the inevitable in a prison of syntax that ensures it will never arrive: though the title understands that we, all of us, are dead, we are only dead in the future.

Like Gladney, Müller realizes that the real enemy facing someone obsessed with the finality of death is linear time; however, where Gladney is helpless to DeLillo’s authorial needs, Müller functions both as creator and character.  Müller, creator of the artifact that is In the Future, We are Dead, kindly accommodates her own needs as a character by disrupting, suspending, and otherwise thwarting temporality in a number of ways that also subvert the sequential and generic logic typically central to the creation of a comic book. Part of this disruption has to do with a use of form and structure not dissimilar from White Noise; Müller creates nine distinct sections but only numbers four of them, rendering the notion of “chapter” as ineffectual or at least incomplete. Likewise, Müller creates vignettes that, like DeLillo’s first twenty chapters, resist readers’ attempts to create a single story. However, by alternating between “chapters” that are black and white and “chapters” that feature five carefully controlled colors, Müller takes advantages of an element unavailable to DeLillo to draw attention to cycles and patterns of repetition while managing to do what DeLillo could not, fending off plot completely.

In addition to the formally innovative efforts to free her own story from temporality, Müller employs two strategies to cater to her anxieties concerning the way that all stories must end. First, the episodes recorded in In the Future, We are Dead all feature dreams, visions, memories, and other meditations that, like the book’s title, suspend events and happenings in a present-tense where everything is now and nothing can change. Even if Müller evolves throughout her life in order to eventually accept ways in which she, every day, is living with death, she creates the book in such a way that death is free to simultaneously accompany her as an idea or fact while never arriving as a material reality; thanks to the literary present, she is in these pages, forever now, always already with death but never headed toward the future where she is dead. Death functions as an obsessive train of thought and an omnipresent subject of obsession; conversely and poignantly though, this strategy comes with its own tyranny. The present-tense benefits of embracing her anxiety in such a way that renders the future moot also traps Müller in episodes – her life in punk rock, her brief relationship with a woman who wouldn’t leave her house, and her complicated experiences with Yoga – that depict a life nearly devoid of a life story.

The perils and advantages of a carefully designed but, in turn, inescapable present-tense through which the past and future are both available only as ideas is most evident in the second mechanism through which Müller attempts to conquer time and sequentialism: the full-page panel. Again and again, Müller creates full-page layouts that look like early modern woodcuttings or paintings; unlike conventional full-page comic layouts, these pages do not feature complex or revelatory actions so much as they serve to fossilize moments as a-temporal religious iconography or text-book illustrations. Such pages resemble early Christian depictions of the Catholic saints and dare the reader to question the difference between accommodating one’s fear of death and living a life of self-martyrdom. The results are compelling, disturbing, sad, and resolute-if-not-triumphant in equal measure. As a reader who experiences his own anxiety disorder as a kind of solipsism, I found the book to be one of the most honest representations of the disability I have ever encountered: anxiety is a problem that presents itself as a tool to solve the real problem.  

Returning to the color scheme, black and white sections – often associated with dissociation or depression – give way to and eventually reclaim sections that carefully introduce red, white, and blue. Though Müller wrote the book in German and it is never set in the United States, the book is hard to read, at least in her English translation, without thinking about the American flag. Thinking about existentialism as a genre and its premise that freedom is the real source of dread concerning life and its inevitable ending, the consistent and abstracted presence of these disembodied colors draw attention to the way that, both in creating the artifact of In the Future, We are Dead and in existing inside of it, every choice that Eva Müller makes is over-determined by her anxiety in order to resist the terror that is true freedom. 

If it feels like a stretch to read Müller’s use of red, white, and blue – and only red, white, and blue – as a conscious attempt to associate anxiety with freedom as it is purportedly exported by America, it is worth noting that, in White Noise, DeLillo similarly correlates anxiety with invasive Americana. The opening section – featuring the twenty chapters most stylistically similar to In the Future, We are Dead   is titled “Waves and Radiation.” In lieu of plot development, the reader gets extended litanies of product names and a series of musings about consumer detritus. In other words, anxiety is framed as a byproduct of late-stage capitalism that seeps into the natural world. While Müller may be doing something similar by featuring an American color scheme that threatens to encroach and overtake a black and white world, anxiety is depicted as much older post-modernity. For DeLillo, anxiety is generated, or at least heightened, by trends to understand capitalist consumption as a proxy for the pursuit of happiness. Müller, on the other hand, appears to understand anxiety as coterminous with the notion that happiness must or even can be pursued in the context of a finite lifespan. If DeLillo depicts anxiety as a man-made contagion produced by progress, Müeller sees it as a fundamental component of humanity endowed by a creator, the lack thereof, or even – if we take solipsism seriously – one’s own mind. What pollutes the world of White Noise creates and embodies the world of In the Future, We are Dead in which all objects, natural or otherwise, are haunted by an observer’s knowledge that nothing lasts forever.  

Throughout In the Future, We are Dead, anxiety is simultaneously an infliction that inhibits living and a mechanism by which one copes with having to be alive and eventually die. Seeing death everywhere, every day, as Müller does, is a product of anxiety, but it is also a way to endow the physical world with its own ghost in the off-chance that spirits are not subject to the laws of nature. 

Many books are haunted.

In the Future, We are Dead is haunted – stubbornly, completely – by design.

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Matt Vadnais has taught college literature and creative writing classes for twenty years. He is the author of All I Can Truly Deliver and a contributor at covermesongs.com. For more comics coverage and the occasional tweet about Shakespeare, follow him @DoctorFanboi. For short takes on longboxes, subscribe to his channel of video essays. 

Books in Bites 20: HALLO SPACEBOY by Beth Barnett, A LONE DEER AT THE END OF THE WORLD by D. Bradford Gambles, and DOG NURSE by Margot Ferrick

Quick Reviews of Some Books I Picked Up at SPX 2018

HALLO SPACEBOY
By Beth Barnett

The earnestness of Beth Barnett’s Hallo Spaceboy is what sets it apart. Part autobio, part ode, this short, self-published comic is a love letter to an idealized David Bowie and his place in Barnett’s life as the “creative parent”. As an exploration of identity, this collection of three short comics points to the importance of influence; how, in the midst of feeling like an outsider, the greatest gift a person can receive is someone with whom they can identify. When Ziggy Stardust cries out “Oh no, love, you’re not alone … Gimme your hands, ‘cause you’re wonderful” there is connection, affirmation, and purpose. This becomes a powerful spur towards self-validation and a boost to the creative impulse. Barnett lays this bare here, and, in doing so, she connects herself to the larger group -- to those of us who found community in the idea of Bowie.

Adding to this, Barnett viscerally captures the experience of January 11. 2016, when so many of us awoke to news of Bowie’s death. Walking through a snow-covered park, Barnett thinks “Why am I taking this so hard?” and the answers she finds are the answers so many of us found on that day. Like Barnett, I, too, “drowned” in Blackstar that day, trying to find that last piece of truth that I felt that I needed from a man I’d never met and yet had played such a pivotal role in my life. Barnett’s cartooning, with its simple lines and compelling use of negative space, carries the poignance of the emotions of this day with fragility and reverence. 

Hallo Spaceboy’s value is in its devotion, its sincerity, and its earnestness. It embraces a shared experience and conveys it unabashedly. And in this, it allows us to remember that we’re not alone, and, even more importantly, we are, indeed, wonderful.

A LONE DEER AT THE END OF THE WORLD
By D. Bradford Gambles
Published by Birdcage Bottom Books

In the midst of a post-apocalyptic winter, a lone deer wanders out of the woods and into an abandoned shopping mall. What happens next is a savage take-down of the hollowness and vanity inherent in consumer culture. Rendered in sumptuous colors and crisp cartooning, A Lone Deer at the End of the World lays bare the contrast between the serenity of the natural world and humanity’s disconnected push to exploit, reshape, and acquire all that nature offers. D. Bradford Gambles drops any pretext of subtlety in the pages of this comic, choosing rather to smack his readers in the face with his message. In this, his polemic gains power.

In Gambles’ hands, this diatribe is a plea to humanity to slow down, reassess, re-prioritize, and embrace that which truly has value. He asks us to recognize the inherent vapidness of the pursuit of things to bring meaning to our lives. He asserts that the hunt for futile significance can only lead to our eventual destruction.

It’s heavy-handed stuff, yet the book never becomes ham-fisted thanks to Gambles’ artistry. Through the use of silence, pacing, and an amazing command of his color palette, his book points dramatically at repercussions, but not into his readers’ faces. Throughout, Gambles acknowledges that his reader already knows the truth he is revealing. His storytelling highlights hopefulness even amidst the wasteland he has created.

DOG NURSE
By Margot Ferrick
Published by Perfectly Acceptable Press

Inscrutable, triumphant, and beautiful, Margot Ferrick’s Dog Nurse seems, like so much of her work, both incredibly personal and yet held at arm’s length. As a narrative, the comic is concerned with the story of Songy, a child that “has a grotesque, dynamic nose and an ailment called mumblemouth that makes her speech difficult to comprehend.” A caretaker named Dog Nurse is hired to take care of her. 

In addressing issues like communication, compassion, self-efficacy, parenting, abuse, and innocence, there is both sadness and hope at its core. Ferrick seems to be both exploring trauma and celebrating the discovery of one’s voice. Ferrick seems to create from the subconscious. She presents a dream-like meditation that verges on the revelatory, which ultimately spins into a more universal sensibility. Pushing away direct identification, Dog Nurse operates on the periphery. The reader looks into a mirror, but is unsure that what is reflected is how they want to be seen. Yet it is hard not to recognize outlines of the self.

Dog Nurse is a difficult book to wrap your head around from an intellectual point-of-view. It demands that you open a part of you that is more attuned to the intuitive and instinctual self. Ferrick asks you to return to a time of inexperience, when much of what happens to you can’t be processed through a practiced past. This is a very young and vulnerable time, full of confusion and learning, where you are dependent upon a guide to give meaning to what happens to and around you. What happens when those guides are incapable of providing a sense of knowledge or orientation? This is where one’s own sense of power and self-esteem develop. And that development is, in large part, based upon the will to survive.

Thanks to the amazing production values of Perfectly Acceptable Press, Dog Nurse is presented as an art book with French Fold interiors, a chipboard cover fastened with black brads, and printed in a single edition of 350 copies. This enhances a kind of preciousness about the book and adds to its weight. The combination of the work’s theme and presentation combine to produce something unique; less a book to place upon a shelf and more something to be read and put out for display. 

Books in Bites 5: Three Comics Worth Your Attention (SPX Special)

Quick Reviews of Three Books you may be interested in.

(note: I picked up all 3 of these books at this year’s SPX)

CONRAD DILLINGER’S INEVITABLE DEATH

by Nick Francis Potter

Published by Potter Press

Available Here

“The danger in standing paralyzed thinking about Death is giving Death the opportunity to start thinking about you.” Conrad Dillinger comes to this and other conclusions in Nick Francis Potter’s 35 page ambient existential comic called Conrad Dillinger’s Inevitable Death. It is as much a meditation on death, as it is a meditation on existence, as it is a meditation on inaction, as it is an exploration on the comics medium itself. Wrapped up in the confines of the nine panel grid, most of what is conveyed in the text is through stasis and potential rather than any formal action.

Yet in this quietness, it shouts loudly in our faces.

Think of Warhol’s Screen Tests. Warhol would set up his 16mm Bolex and shoot 100 feet of black and white film of his subject as they sat solidly before the camera. The longer they sat there, the more their pretenses would collapse and, by the end of the film, the audience were able to engage with the core of the individual on the screen. Potter’s presentation is of the same thrust in this book. We have Conrad Dillinger facing the reader relatively unchanged for 315 panels (35 nine panel pages), and, by the end, he is transformed both literally and figuratively. It’s contemplative and confrontational all at the same time, to the point where the panel borders themselves even begin to become part of the revelatory process. There is a claustrophobia inherent in repetition, yet Potter is able to avoid this, making the tight place of sameness seem open and expansive.

Potter is obviously experimenting here. There is a sense that he is trying to figure out how to tell a highly emotional story that features a fully realized character by placing much of the onus on the reader to fill in the blanks left unsaid in the gutters of each nine panel grid. The term “virtuoso” seems almost grandiose here, but Potter is one as much as Warhol was one, and that, of course, is the subject of both debate and interpretation. What is certain is that Potter is pushing the medium by deletion more than addition. He’s taking the epic hollering of the 9 panel page and turning it into a soft haiku that punches even harder by not swinging at all.

You can pick up a copy of Conrad Dillinger’s Inevitable Death here.

LEFT EMPTY

by Alan King and Jamie Vayda

Published by Birdcage Bottom Books

Available Here

So much of Alan King and Jamie Vayda’s Left Empty undulates with the rhythm of sobbing and the weight of absence. The past collaborations between these two artists, such as The Rats Were Bad That Year and the wonderful short “The Time I Shit My Pants at a Motorhead Show" in Loud Comix #3, all seem to have been a wild spree, preparation for the nakedness of Left Empty. While this is King’s story, it is Vayda who does the majority of the storytelling. There is wrenching clarity to Vayda’s lines and choices that when King’s words do finally intrude upon the narrative, it is almost shocking.

Book One of Left Empty is a brutal tale of the after effects of loss, the regret that blankets every second guess, and the destructiveness of the abyss. King does little to paint himself as a role model and Vayda portrays the downward spiral with such visceral power that you almost smell the decay that you are witnessing in his pages.

And then there are these dream sequence pages that push everything into the realm of the archetype. These pages remind us that there is horror always lurking, that chaos is the force that moves the world forward, that all of our ideas of safety and control are only an illusion, and that the only certainty is death. When she or he whom you love is forever stolen from you it is not only that person that has died. King and Vayda’s comic softly hisses this in your ear. This is not a book you give to those seeking solace or comfort. Each page hurts.

Jamie Vayda’s art has never been this crisp. Each beat is on target, every emotion conveyed, nothing is wasted. These two guys are working in tandem, playing to each other’s strengths, bringing out the best in each other. King has said of Left Empty, “It’s a story that’s not always easy to tell, but one that needs telling.” Whether it serves a cathartic need for King, or provide some sort of closure for him, I wouldn’t hazard a guess. All I can say is that we are all the better for him having taken to tell this story, and all the better for him choosing Vayda to help him do just that.

You can pick up a copy of Left Empty: Book One here.

STEEPEST DESCENT

by Aleks Sennwald

Published by Ray-Ray Books

Available Here

While Aleks Sennwald’s Steepest Descent has been out for nearly a year, SPX was the first time I had ever seen it. Once I did , I knew I had to have it for my collection.  

The solicitation for the book reads, “In the desert, science and technology come head to head with magic and mystery as a mother and daughter attempt to bridge the gap.” It’s a vague pitch, to say the least, but it encapsulates only part of the theme Sennwald is dabbling with here. For Steepest Descent is also about the procreative power, not only that which is inherent in the biology of women, but also that which is in the mind of the dreamer and the artist.

The book is celebratory in intent. It has a central conceit of creating life through destruction, as well as the whole science/magic binary dance, but it strikes me also as a book mainly about women -- their power and how threatening that can be to men. Men in this book can only steal, they cannot create. Yet it is this act of theft that provides the catalyst for the magic of the book to occur. Had I a stronger background in this type of thinking, I’m sure that there is a philosophical notion that makes sense of this seeming juxtaposition.

I’m not one to step into waters I don’t know enough about, as I’m bound to sully the system more than swim smoothly across.

So let’s leave it at this: Steepest Descent is one of those books that you will read a number of times as each time you immerse in its pages, you rise from the depths with something new clenched between your teeth. There is power here that has been carefully crafted by Sennwald to vibrate with the imaginable. In this book, what is tragic sets the stage for something evolutionary, both here among us, and even further out into the universe.

It’s something worth spending solitary moments spellbound.

You can pick up a copy of Steepest Descent here.