Turning Gifts Into Presents: Rob Clough reviews Leslie Stein's PRESENT

When I think of autobiographical cartoonists who make sheer beauty through craft a priority in their work, Leslie Stein's name immediately comes to mind. Stein's earlier black and white comics were marked by extremely delicate linework combined with an intense stippling technique that was no doubt incredibly work-intensive. She was the only notable cartoonist I could recall who still used such a technique after Drew Friedman abandoned it years ago. Recently, Stein has switched to a watercolor-and-ink technique notable for its brightness and spareness. Her comics in her Eye Of The Majestic Creature series always had a magical realist bent, with anthropomorphic musical instruments and other whimsical and experimental elements fitting in with stories based on her actual life. There's a sense in which her watercolor comics (mostly done for Vice magazine online) also have a fantastical element, but it's entirely in terms of form instead of content. 

That element is the reader looking through Stein's eyes at the world and finding it a magical, colorful place. There is a strong sense of intentionality at work here, as Stein hints that she draws this way in part to combat her fears. In this regard, the title of her newest collection of strips, Present (Drawn and Quarterly), has a double meaning. In the introduction to Present, Stein talks about her attempting to flip a switch in her brain when doing something unpleasant and changing her outlook on the activity. In particular, when drawing comics, she flips the switch from "challenge" to "gift". Being able to create is a gift (or present) she gives herself and others, and in order to do so, she must remain present, or focused on singular moments. She alludes to depression and finding few activities that bring her joy, with drawing and drinking at the top of the list. Those are interests that both serve to alter here, albeit in vastly different ways and with diverging consequences. Stein also reveals that despite the fact that she mostly lives a nocturnal existence as a bartender and musician, the night has always made her fearful and afraid to be alone. That's especially troubling for Stein, whose entire body of work has addressed her intense introversion that borders on solipsism with a contradictory need for connection and belonging. 

In that sense, each of the short, delightful stories in this volume act as a sort of buffer against fear, a candle lit instead of cursing the darkness. Whereas some of her previous stories about her childhood focused on darker and more uncertain aspects of the experience, this volume sees an older Stein who's come to terms with that past and has embraced her family in full. Stories like "Daughter's Day", "Mom Guilt", "True Success" and "Thanksgiving" explore that past and revel in the closeness of her present relationships. "True Success" is about visiting her father and going to a Smokey Robinson concert whose surprising sexual lyrical contents ("Love Bath"!) made for a hilarious level of discomfort. "Daughter's Day" and "Mom Guilt" are both about remote communication with her mother and how much her mother not only loves Leslie, but how much she admires her as an artist. The same was true with the story about her father, as she received unexpected praise. "Thanksgiving" reveals that her parents split up shortly after she was born, so she never saw them together, making the holiday with them and her brother so delightfully strange. 

For these comics, Stein uses an open-page format, with no panels or structure. The drawings simply flow into one another. It's rare that a comic employs color to do so much of the heavy lifting of storytelling, but Stein's minimalist and restrained use of both line and hue makes it easy for the reader to not only quickly move from image to image, but to fill in gaps in shape and form. That commitment to clarity allows Stein to occasionally step outside of those bounds. For example, when her mother asks for a drawing from her for Christmas, there's a beat where Stein looks at the camera (with tiny dots for eyes and a sliver of a line for a nose) and then she melts into a puddle of happiness on the final panel of the page. Cleverly, the next page picks up in a bar, where the image is of a spilled drink, continuing that image from the previous page in a next context. Additionally, Stein's lettering is very much a part of the drawing, as she'll occasionally switch from her normal handwriting to use larger letters in a different color for emphasis. She'll also catch the reader's eye by putting in some background watercolors underneath the letters. The paper in this book is also important; it's a sort of cream-colored paper that adds a warmth to each page that a brighter, shinier page would not. 

Most of the other stories in Present are about being a single woman living and working alone in the city. There's an aching melancholy pervading each of these stories, even as Stein tries to find a way to either dull that feeling or actively seek the kind of engagement that she knows is difficult but ultimately rewarding. "Vanguard", for example, sees Stein teaching art and then taking her own lessons to heart as she stumbles upon a jazz club and draws, just as she told her students to. "Perfect Day" extends that idea, as she meets a friend for an unofficial date that winds up turning into a day filled with beautiful memories, culminating with a show watching a schizophrenic trumpet player. "Night Out" sees two close male friends pulling her out of her isolation into a great evening, making her feel loved. 

In many of the stories, the occasional sadness of this life is also addressed. "The Architect" finds Stein helping a drunk and confused woman get home safely, because she knows that she had been that person on many occasions. In "The Bridge", a lonely Stein is walking across the Manhattan Bridge, wonders how many people jump off of it, and makes a joking reference to suicide on Instagram that alarms her friends. Seeing a comedian do a hilarious but in-your-face about suicide right after that helps reset her mood positively. In "Exes" and "Omakase", Stein ponders past relationships. The former story finds a lonely and insomniac Stein asking to sleep at an ex's place and confronting the feeling that she might wind up alone. The latter story is set at a sushi restaurant where she's eating delicious food (a running theme in the book) and thinking about the one ex she's not still friends with: her ex-fiance'. Again, there's a sense of the bitter and the sweet in this comic that's the essence of the book. There is pain and loneliness, but there are friends, beloved customers and delightful weirdness to experience. There is existential isolation but also joys to be experienced by all the senses, including art, food, drink and music. 

The unspoken theme of Present, as it is in much of Stein's work, is the role drinking plays and played in her life as a kind of self-medicating act. She alludes to it constantly, though in this book a lot of it is in the past tense, as her ability and willingness to accept pain has made it possible for her to also fully open herself up to accepting joy. That joy is then channeled into her art, providing a gift both for herself and her readers. 

--------------------------------------------------------------------

Rob Clough has written about comics for Cicada, the Comics Journal, Sequential, tcj.com, sequart.com, Savant, Foxing Quarterly, Studygroup Magazine, as well as for his own blog, High-Low (highlowcomics.blogspot.com).

KILGORE QUARTERLY #7: The Art of The Self

KILGORE QUARTERLY #7

Edited by Dan Stafford

Featuring works by Summer Pierre, Tim Lane, Joseph Remnant, Sam Spina, and Leslie Stein

Published by Kilgore Books

Here’s something that you probably already know: putting together anthologies is a tricky business. It usually takes a certain level of editorial intent in order for a collection to hang together on its own. As far as Kilgore Quarterly #7 goes, though, editor Dan Stafford says this one “focuses on longer works from artists who have orphaned stories. Some of these appeared elsewhere, have gone out of print, and need to be read by more people, some are from forthcoming works, and some just needed a home.” Throwing together something palatable with this sort of junk-drawer editorial construct strikes me as akin to the meals I make at the end of the week using all the leftovers in the fridge. Sometimes it tastes disgusting, sometimes transcendent. You just don’t know what you’re going to get when you throw it all in the pot.

Amazingly, though, Kilgore Quarterly #7 tastes great.

In the end, the disparate voices and styles complement each other by bringing out thoughts and themes that stand out through their juxtaposition far greater than they would have by themselves. Though separate and contained, each piece is magnified by its relationship within the whole. Through what may be happenstance, this anthology ends up being thematically sound -- an exploration of the relationship between art and the artist.

Reading Kilgore Quarterly #7 makes me think that it would benefit by the subtitle: The Art of The Self.

The collection opens with Summer Pierre’s “Dappled Light”, a five-page, thickly inked rumination on the connection between “sitcoms from the 1950’s and 1960’s” and the author’s creative output. Pierre reflects on her past, spending “hours after school drawing to old TV shows” and the escapism that activity provided, an exercise that transported her not necessarily out of time but out of place. A jarring two-panel sequence halfway through “Dappled Light” indicates a certain level of abuse Pierre suffered as a child. This abuse provides the impetus for the connection Pierre feels for these long past TV shows, “a place filled with dappled light -- uncluttered by secrets or rage.” The final horizontal panel of the artist as a young girl curled up on a couch emits the feeling of comfort inherent in escapism. The correlation between the acts of her watching those old shows and of her creating art demonstrates a sense of purpose behind the two endeavors. Here, escapism is at the core of creating the self. Pierre is, in effect, stating clearly that her art is what allowed her to define the person she longed to be.

The next piece in Kilgore Quarterly #7 is “Steve McQueen Has Vanished” by Tim Lane. Drawn in straightforward, naturalistic style, Lane’s use of light and dark elements, plus his choices of perspective and tight close-ups, give the piece a vaguely noir sensibility. Ostensibly, the narrative revolves around a stranger showing up at a roadside motel. The stranger may or may not be the actor Steve McQueen who, according to news reports, has disappeared from public view -- perhaps due to a feud with Paul Newman regarding billing in the film Towering Inferno. Where narrative ends, theme begins, as Lane becomes more introspective regarding the nature of identity, exploring how everything we do, especially creative acts, defines how the world sees us, and how that self is as much a creation as the act itself. Where the true self lies is somewhere altogether different, a place of solitude, reflection, and contemplation. In Lane’s piece, art is a mask the artist wears in public, a persona created by the audience who have projected their own desires and needs onto its face. For the artist, that mask is either something to hide behind or be suffocated by. In the end, Lane’s story becomes more about the narrator than the characters it describes. In that, “McQueen” takes the universal and localizes it to the experience of a stand-in for ourselves.

Would I have read “Steve McQueen Has Vanished” along these lines had it not been for Summer Pierre’s piece prior to it? I don’t think so. Such is the power of putting these pieces together.

Likewise, Joseph Remnant’s “I Told You So” continues the framing theme of the art of the self. Remnant’s propensity to fill his panels with small diagonal lines belies the influence artists like Robert Crumb have on his work, but it also adds a certain dingy foreboding to his cartooning, as if filth and darkness are constantly threatening to engulf everything. This is another story about understanding a person through the work they create. To be honest, it’s my favorite piece in Killgore Quarterly #7, and it’s heartbreakingly sweet, the kind of comic where you end up smiling a teary-eyed grin at in the end, though the process to getting there is a painful journey to walk. Remnant is able to turn the sad-sack upside-down and unpack its heart. There’s every reason not to root for the protagonist in this piece. After all, he’s a moody, mopey, privileged white boy whose actions, though well-intentioned, smack of, at best, social awkwardness. And yet….

And yet in “I Told You So” Remnant exposes that one’s true self can be found in their art, as long as it speaks to the truth of the heart. If art is pushed out because of some obligatory grasp at what others have expressed is true, then it smacks false and reveals nothing but a void within. When it speaks of the self, though, it is revelatory, worthy of encapsulating that which is the real “you”.

Sam Spina comments further on this idea with his contribution to Kilgore Quarterly #7, “K. Trout Makes His Move”, which wraps itself in an absurd metatextual bind. This comic begins with a down-on-his-luck fish who uses his name, which also happens to be Sam Spina, to get laid. It then pulls back to the “real” Sam Spina who is incredibly pleased for having created “another perfect comic” in a coffee shop, where he is summarily beaten for being a “lanky little freak”. At the end, a fish which had been living in human Spina’s knit-hat comments, “Wow! Your comics just get better and better!” Here the relationship between the artist and his art is bundled into a self-awareness that nobody outside of himself can conceptualize. Art is a lie that serves to bolster the self, to give it power and meaning in a world that is chaotic and draining. Spina’s comic is only of value to himself, empowering him to a moment where the true self is given voice and agency. Though the human Spina is physically repulsed of this idea through the agency of others, the fish in his hat, the idea of self that Spina still grabs hold of, continues to be unswayed. Whatever humor it is intended to convey and/or contains, “K. Trout Makes His Move” is a complex bit of business.

Rounding out Kilgore Quarterly #7 is Leslie Stein’s “The Desk”. In “The Desk”, Stein features her semi-autobiographical character, Larrybear, from her Eye Of The Majestic Creature series. Here, a young Larry builds a desk in the doorway of her room using oversized fake bricks. As her family members walk by, she says, “Hello! Larry’s room! How can I help you?” -- though neither her mother nor her sibling pay her any mind. While this is, on the surface, a simple childhood reminiscence of “playing adult”, there’s still that undercurrent of how artists use their art to define themselves.

There’s a lot to process in “The Desk”. The image of a child using bricks to seal up half of the entrance to their bedroom in order to become something more than they are is the stuff that post-Freudian analysts dream of. The fact that her family ignores her assumed identity, this “false self” that Larry has created through an act of imagination, also speaks volumes as to Stein’s own sense of herself. Larry eventually has to pee. Because of this physical need, she has to break through the wall she has created with her artistry, clearly demarking the line between the self as a corporeal thing and the self as a conceived thing. The body as form must break through the barrier of art in order to satisfy its needs, showing its predominance in the cartesian duality that plagues us all. “The Desk” ends with Larrybear cleaning up her bricks and focuses on a shattered picture frame that holds a portrait of herself. The line between who she is and who she wants to be is clear. It is only through an act of sheer artistic endeavor that she will ever become actualized as her desired self.

Again, Kilgore Quarterly #7 would benefit by a subtitle: The Art of The Self.

All my interpretations of each piece are only brought to the fore through its interaction with the pieces that preceded it. This is the mark of a coherent anthology. Dan Stafford has collected all these “orphans” and has given them a home in Kilgore Quarterly #7. They become a family by the proximity they share. These leftovers only become a truly harmonious meal when they stirred together in the same pot, and I, for one, have become more aware of myself for having tasted this dish.

Top 15 Comics (I Reviewed) in 2016

I think most of us are in agreement that 2016 was one of those years that took the wind out of a lot of our sails. It was easy to stagnate and bob in the middle of unchartered waters looking around at our dwindling supplies with terror in our eyes. In fact, 2016 made me take full stock and prioritize in ways that I never have before.

As Coleridge once wrote, “Water, water everywhere, Nor any drop to drink.”

Still, even unmoored in the vastness of this ocean and all its oncoming storms, there were little moments of calm when the sun cracked through the clouds and reflected beautifully on the tops of the waves. There were still brave artists making profound works and unleashing them into the world. Thank you all for that.

The following are 15 of my favorite comics I reviewed in 2016. Click on the titles to read my full write-ups. All italicized parts are taken from those reviews.

15. Star Wars Special: C-3PO #1

Written by: James Robinson

Art by: Tony Harris

Published by: Marvel Comics

Earlier in the year, Chase Magnett and I started a comics criticism column called Crocked Critics which, ostensibly, was to be the two of us drinking too much and talking about shitty comics. In the middle of April, we geared up and drank up and dove into this obvious corporate cash-grab crossover crap, only to find it to be one of the most impressive books I read all year.

C-3PO wonders “How important have I been?”

Which hits right to the core of all of us. Right? As we are essentially the summation of our experiences (sprinkled, as it were, with a fine dusting of genetics), it stands to reason that the ultimate human question is “How important have I been?” To have these words come out of a construct, a droid, throws so much sand in the eyes of philosophy that I kind of went weak in the knees when I read it.

What the hell is James Robinson’s end-game here? How much of this is pre-ordained by the corporate concerns of Marvel/Lucas Films/Disney — and how much of this is the expression of an artist who, given the simple task of explaining how C-3PO got his fucking red arm, takes that narrow conceit and shows his true artistry?

14. I Feel Weird #1

Created by: Haleigh Buck

Published by: Hey Boy! Press

Haleigh Buck is writing I Feel Weird to heal herself and, by doing so, help to heal others. It is a diary comic of sorts, chronicling Buck’s own battle/recovery with mental illness. It’s deeply personal and communicative. I shared this with some of my students and they really took to it. They were glad it existed. Issue #2 of the book is equally spectacular.

And it is this that transforms I Feel Weird from diary to art -- that liminal space between experience and transmutation -- from immediacy to contemplation in the moment of creation. By the very existence of these pages, the reader carries through, confronted with the emotional crotch-kick of Buck’s narrative, knowing that through her art she has put distance to her inner horror and has reconstructed it into something for us all.

13. Casanova: Acedia

Written by: Matt Fraction

Art by: Fábio Moon

Published by: Image Comics

Is anyone even reading this series anymore? Two years in and we are only at issue 7? The irregularity with which it comes out is somehow perfect given the nature of its contents. This is one bonkers book. Full of fun and inside jokes and action and dicks and dimension hopping and rocking and rolling, Fraction and Moon are cooking one big sandwich on the Foreman Grill with this iteration of their decade long ode to super-spy comics.

I’ve also been suffusing all of my reviews with Bowie lyrics. And Bowie died. Fuck that.

I still love this series, though.

But the train that is Casanova constantly holds together. While Fraction may be putting the loco in this locomotive, the real engineer continues to be Fábio Moon. At the center of it all, at the center of it all. Art and colors. Dynamic. Fluid. Beat for beat. Beautiful.

12. Other Selves

Created by: Theo Ellsworth

Theo Ellsworth continues to show the world that he’s got his own thing going on, and that thing may, in some small way, end up saving the world, one self at a time. This is a 64 page black and white self-published mini that Ellsworth put together for this year’s Linework NW and it’s all Ellsworth, full of meticulous and dense pages of direct address and dream-like images.

Ellsworth calls this book a “psychic chiropractic adjustment” (to be filed under: “Hand Drawn Inner-Space Documentary Comics”). Here he is an artist viewing himself as the one who is in control of creating the Other Selves of his imagination. As he probes deeper and deeper into his self-creations, though, things get weirder and weirder, layering levels of the fantastic and the imaginative, each self in control of itself. Finally his inner workings are so far out that a part of him unleashes the “Reality Control Officers” into his “Personal Imaging Zone” admonishing him to “Go back to reality! Now!” What remains is a battle between inspiration and sense, art versus logic.

11. Time Clock

Created by: Leslie Stein

Published by: Fantagraphics

Continuing her Eye of the Majestic Creature series, Leslie Stein keeps unfolding the life of her semi-autobiographical doppelganger, Larrybear, and her gang of friends. This one is sad and funny and beautiful.

Larrybear’s interactions with those she loves and those she stumbles into are confessional on either end. Though Stein suffuses much of these moments with humor or absurdity, they have an emotional truth at their core. Those whose lives she touches see their interactions through the lens of their own distractions and understandings. Larrybear exudes an endearing and surreal sweetness that brings others into her various spheres, comforting or confusing them in a manner that is seemingly just what they both need at that juncture.

Whether it be popping pretensions or providing inspiration or affirming humanity, Larrybear seems to say or do the right thing, no matter how off-kilter it is. There is nothing mean anywhere, even in the casual, but rather there is an over-riding kindness that cannot be helped.

Even as Larrybear draws inside herself and faces her own uncertainty, Time Clock seems to acknowledge that above all else, we have no other option than to acknowledge that we are all in this together.

So why not choose kindness?

10. Silver Wire

Created by: Jordan Shiveley

Published by: Uncivilized Books

This is another small book that seemingly slipped under a number of people’s radar, but it is a quiet, powerful book that deserves a wider audience. Shively calls it a “mouse tragicomedy” and it is all about the casualness with which we loathe ourselves and how, by harming ourselves, we do the most damage to the people we would never want to hurt at all.

Silver Wire works because of its pacing. It unfolds from minutia to the larger world and back again. Even in its most dramatic moment, Silver Wire takes the time to linger on the soft gestures that Shively uses to convey emotion -- the distance engendered by both the choice of using mice and the choice of taking everything down to basic shapes in his rendering. Somehow this makes the emotional beats that much more potent. In these layers of erasure the reader finds their own faces and connects, as if the hardest punch comes from the softest hand.

9. Every Life I Ever Lived

Created by: Robin William Scott

Published by: Good Comics

Sometimes a book comes to you at the absolute right time for its true weight to rest in your hands. So it was with Every Life I Ever Lived. Given the overwhelming chaos unleashed by the last half of 2016, Scott’s gentle reminder to look around and pay attention to the little moments, to understand life is its own work of art, was healing.

Every Life I Ever Lived is essentially a collection of diary comics. It is comprised of 100 (mostly) four panel strips capturing Scott’s daily routine, one day at a time. Herein, Scott details the meals he ate, the beers he drank, and the television he watched. He captures his time at work, his concerns about learning to drive, and his problems with sleep. In the pages of Every Life I Ever Lived there is no pretension, no didacticism, no polemic against modernity, and no exhortation to the “better person.” Rather, there is a laser focus on the platitudinous and bromidic, the marking of time and the distractions sought — the tiny moments of life.

In seeing his “Self” in his days he sees his “Self” as it is, wobbly at times, unsure and detached — he reaches out and reaches in, and in this, becomes the everyman, and in this, becomes heroic.

8. What Happened

Created by: Simon Moreton

Published by: Killgore Books

Simon Moreton creates art that is beautiful in the complexity of its simplicity. He pares down storytelling to the essentials: the essential moments, the essential lines, the essential beats. Between his self-published zines and his published longer works, the oeuvre of Moreton is to be treasured for how it exposes the world to the possibilities of quieting down a little.

It’s amazing how much information can be conveyed when you remove the details. Such is the premise of the art of British cartoonist Simon Moreton. In What Happened, his latest release from small press publisher Kilgore Books, Moreton combines thin lines, thick scribbles, and a profusion of Dot Toning in order to craft an April to September tale of childhood summer that softly and deftly evokes what changes and what stays the same in the process of growing up.

7. My Dead Mother

Created by: Clara Jetsmark

Published by: Uncivilized Books

I picked up an early edition of this book at SPX this year without any sense whatsoever as to what it contained. What it contained, though, was something magical. Smart, outstanding, and bonkers, My Dead Mother came at me from unexpected places; each page went sidewise, yet I ended up really happy with the destination.

In My Dead Mother, it is only when women carve out a path for themselves that actualization occurs and the cycle of dependency is broken. Yet Jetsmark is never thematically heavy-handed in her book. She uses the elements inherent in comics to make her point and relies on her deft and tight cartooning to allow her motif to unfold. There is as much a clarity to her tight lines as there is to her storytelling. In the midst of such a daring narrative, one that could easily become bogged down in the preciousness of the idea, there is an undeniable confidence in Jetsmark’s art which transfers to the book’s easy readability.

6. Our Mother

Created by: Luke Howard

Published by: Retrofit/Big Planet

Our Mother is a book that only congeals upon finishing. It’s one of those books that you have to have faith in -- as its rewards are many, but require patience for the payoff. Howard’s art in this works perfectly for what he is exploring here, and, though seemingly slight, it hits with power.

Our Mother is an incisively transcendent exploration of the effects of anxiety disorder. It works in a structure that seems dispassionate, yet ends up poignant and ardent as it gets to the truth behind trying to comprehend that which is incomprehensible. It sticks because of its humanity; it punches through the shut doors in our brains in welcoming ways, opening passages to a collective understanding of what has happened, how it shapes us, and where it leaves us as we step forward. Sometimes we become who we are by what has happened to us, not through what we have chosen to occur.

5. Frontier #11: BDSM

Created by: Eleanor Davis

Published by: Youth In Decline

Ryan and Jane Sands are doing some amazing things over at San Francisco based publisher, Youth in Decline. One of those things is curating an amazing comic series called Frontier. Pretty much everything in this series is something you should have or should be reading, but in 2016, the clear winner was Eelanor Davis’ contribution, BDSM. There isn’t a line wasted in this book.

Whether it is confronting the ramifications of power in what feminist film critic Laura Mulvey conceptualized and labeled “the male gaze,” or understanding the interpersonal dynamics of dominance and submission in a sexual relationship as it plays out in both a public arena and a private space, Davis uses the framework of a tight narrative structure to expound upon her ideas, allowing the reader to assign understanding a posteriori. In the end, though, the reader ultimately has to confront themselves.

4. Nod Away

Created by: Joshua Cotter

Published by: Fantagraphics

The density and intricacy of Joshua Cotter’s art and narrative in Nod Away are breathtaking. The very thought of him continuing this for another seven volumes boggles the mind. And yet, if he pulls it off at the same level as this first volume, it may become contender for one of the most amazing artistic achievements in comics in the modern era. This is so good.

Ostensibly this first volume is a sci-fi story that circles around issues such as the human desire for exploration and connection, the power structure inherent in gender politics, and the gray area created in the intersection between science and morality, but, as the book unfolds, the reader feels there is something more complicated occurring in the periphery. Cotter is exploring profound questions of consciousness itself by creating a story that asks them indirectly.

3. Beverly

Created by: Nick Drnaso

Published by: Drawn and Quarterly

Growing up in suburbia breeds a certain ennui that is a beast unto itself, available to nobody other than those that inhabit those spaces. I was one of those, and Nick Drnaso’s Beverly hit me in all those old wounds that I thought had scabbed over many years ago. I loved this book so much that I even lobbied hard and successfully to get Keith Silva and Taylor Lilley to write about it with me.

The quest to assimilate is the definition of suburban life. Sure we may try to one-up the Johnsons with a shiny new fully-featured “Hypersonic Red” 2016 Prius Three in order to “Be Someone,” but it’s all tightly bound by the norm– you can only go so far. Thus the repression. Which breeds the ennui.

All swaddled in the smugness of privilege.

As Tyler and Cara’s dad says to his young son, “Cherish these years. You will miss them someday.” There’s perfunctory abuse in these words. It is as it needs to be. It is expected, don’t you see?

Drnaso gets it as if he’s lived it. Beverly connects because it captures the concrete sponge we use to whitewash the lives of suburban white America. It so easily reveals the effortless castigation of the stranger, because one of us would never do us any harm.

2. BLAMMO #9

Created by: Noah Van Sciver

Published by: Kilgore Press

Watching Noah Van Sciver mature as a cartoonist has been amazing. With each successive release, his drawing gets more detailed and his story telling more intimate. This year, BLAMMO #9 came out and it captured me from the beginning to the end. Van Sciver makes so much out of so little; his pacing and choices are spot on. This book is hard to shake, as it speaks deeply to human insecurity and longing.

“Culmination” — it’s a word that is easily bandied about by often thick intellectual types who caper about places of higher learning wearing paisley sweaters and corduroy pants. Derived from the late Latin word culminātus (past participle of culmināre, “to come to a peak”), its definition runs along the lines of something like, “to reach the highest point, summit, or highest development … especially as attained after a long time.” I bring this all up for the following reason: cartoonist Noah Van Sciver has been producing his one-man anthology series Blammo for almost over a decade now, and Blammo #9 serves, in many ways, as a culmination of his development as a cartoonist, artist, and man.

1.

HONORABLE MENTIONS

Lake Imago

Words by: Eddie Wright

Art by: Jamaica Dyer

Bat-Man is Lost in the Woods

Created by: David Enos

Published by: California Clap

Mean Girls Club

Created by: Ryan Heshka

Published by: Nobrow Press

THREE BOOKS I LOVED IN 2016 BUT NEVER GOT AROUND TO REVIEWING

Laid Waste

Created by: Julia Gfrörer

Published by: Fantagraphics

Jacob Bladders and the State of the Art

Created by: Roman Muradov

Published by: Uncivilized Books

Libby’s Dad

Created by: Eleanor Davis

Published by: Retrofit/Big Planet

THE ONE BOOK I UNABASHEDLY HATED THE MOST IN 2016

Dark Night: A True Batman Story

Words by: Paul Dini

Art by: Eduardo Risso

Published by: DC Comics

This fucking book got me so mad that I had to write a screed/rant regarding everything I found poisonous about it. It is a garbage book with a garbage message that needs to be put in the garbage can of history and set on fire. And if you disagree with me, you better come at me with some seriously valid criticism, otherwise sit down, shut up, and leave me alone.

FINAL THOUGHTS

I don’t know how much criticism I’m going to be able to write in 2017. I’m turning 50, quitting smoking, and Trump is our president. This is the proverbial trifecta in terms of battening down the hatches and waiting out the storm.

Yet, as one of the witches says in Macbeth, “Though his bark cannot be lost, Yet it shall be tempest-tossed.”

I wish you all strength, good will, and the quiet respite of good comics in the coming year.

Peace.