My Continuing Crisis: Writing on CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS #4

IT CONTINUES...

As some sort of "self-flagellation psychological experiment", I agreed to take part in Comics Bulletin's celebration of the 30th anniversary of DC Comics' FIRST MAJOR CROSSOVER EVENT, Crisis on Infinite Earths.

READ OUR "REVIEW" OF ISSUE #4 HERE.

"Crisis #4 is certainly a turning point in my understanding of why these books resonate with so many fans of these sorts of comics. I mean, dig that five panel scene with Wonder Woman in which Wolfman kind of explores the complex nature of the relationship between a mother and her daughter. And then there are the last three pages of this book which are as beautiful as they are powerful. Wolfman steps out of the way and lets Perez do the storytelling as we bear witness to the annihilation of universes on a cosmic scale.

I found myself raising my glass at the end, not so I could suck it dry in a desperate attempt to drown my horror, but rather as a toast to something grand and something compelling. "

Big in New Zealand -- Reviewing Jillian Tamaki's SEX COVEN in Youth in Decline's Frontier #7

NEW REVIEW POSTED ON THE NEW ZEALAND COMICS BLOG

FACTIONAL.

Once again, I had the pleasure of writing with New Zealand comic book writer Kelly Sheehan. This time we review Jillian Tamaki's SEX COVEN in Youth in Decline's Frontier #7.

"When you do the work to have an emotional response to art, you are the owner of that experience. Authentic emotions are precious in a world where we are so often sold how to think about things, where outrage is manufactured, enjoyment is a science, and attention an algorithm. And nobody latches on to this more than young people, especially when their peer group embraces it, especially when they see that their parents don't understand it, even more especially when their parents fear it or hate it.

Tamaki captures all of this in her book. The intensity of the reaction to the music and the ritual it inspires are all laid out with fervor and excitement. Tamaki knows the proper moment to abstract her art to convey this ardor, and when to focus on minutia in order to set context and further her story."

Understanding the Concept of CONSENT

tea consent from Blue Seat Studios on Vimeo.

After The Fence We Find Each Other: A Review of Jen Lee's VACANCY

“How cold the vacancy

When the phantoms are gone and the shaken realist

First sees reality.” – Wallace Stevens Esthétique du Mal.

Loneliness is drug. Powerful. Hallucinatory. Its psychoactive effects can lead you to underestimate the consequences of venturing into uncharted territory. To a place you don't belong. A place fraught with danger. “There” not “Here”. Outside. Through the hole in the fence. Into the woods.

But we are not built to be alone. The solitary man is no man at all. A life of quiet contemplation is no life really. Being alive requires us to step forth into the world of others. Shared experiences are more real somehow.

When I was 21, I made a road trip from New York to Texas. Along the way I stopped in Memphis and took the tour of Graceland. As I wandered around Elvis' mansion, my sense of self began to bend in ways it had never bent before. By the time I made it to the Jungle Room, my brain was so filled with an internal dialogue composed of a thick, viscous gibberish that I began to eye all the exit routes, convinced that I would need to flee before it got any worse. If only I had someone I could trust next to me, someone to whom I could have whispered, “Can you believe this?” I could have made sense of the experience, I could have reveled in the weirdness. Alone, I was bent. With a buddy, I would have been King.

Why am I telling this story?

Nobrow Press has just recently published Jen Lee's Vacancy as part of their 17x23 series, and this beautiful book has me thinking about solitude and experience. It's these ideas that provide the backdrop for an amazingly dense story told through character and inference.

The solicitation for Vacancy reads, “In a dishevelled and ransacked backyard, a dog named Simon has been forgotten by his owners. Simon contemplates breaking free and eventually partners up with a raccoon and a deer who take him into the woods. But Simon realizes he is not quite ready to live in the wild.”

In Lee's telling, though, there is a larger background to this seemingly “grass is always greener” story that has to do with anthropomorphic animals, crashed planes, destroyed spaces, quarantine areas, and questions like “Don't you remember what happened to Randall?” Much like her webcomic, Thunderpaw, there is this sense that something apocalyptic has happened, leaving the animals changed, leaving them to fend for themselves, leaving them unsure of what the rules are now. And, like in Thunderpaw, Vacancy revolves around the need for companionship in navigating this new world.

It's a beautiful book both in terms of its storytelling and well as its craft. Lee's use of color is breathtaking, especially her use of sunset and sunrise soft reds and pinks to capture atmosphere, tone, and mood, especially when juxtaposed with the blue-greens of her nights and the momentary stark, flat white of her days. In the 24 pages of Vacancy, things crackle when they should, quiet when you need to hear the whispers, and bleed when something is after you. Lee's cartooning seduces you into one set of emotions – comfortable and familiar in a Saturday Morning sort of way – while the story itself murmurs something strange off to the side, almost hidden in the forest.

Lee's main character is hoodie wearing, bespectacled dog. Simon cannot function in isolation. Upon hearing howls from the woods outside his fenced yard, he dreams of marking “trees with you soon, my yote brothers.” But he just doesn't have the capacity or the wherewithal to venture forth alone from his enclosure, his home. He takes the random opportunity of strangers in his midst to step out into a new world; he needs guides to show him the ropes of this adventure.

But his pathfinders are seemingly little help when it comes to navigating the dangers of the woods. Rather, as the monomyth trope demands, they teach him the value of something more meaningful, the powerful sense-making systems of community, the understanding that we are all that much more capable when we stand together as one.

Lee's world-building is as dynamic a character as her anthropomorphic heroes. As her trio journeys, the environment they discover and cross through develops and, in doing so, tells a secondary story of destruction and despair. Through inference, reading the signposts that Lee has put up in this world, the audience begins to glean what may have happened to Simon's family and why these animals dress and behave as they do. And it is in these conjectures that the reader begins to unfurl a terrible backstory that they, themselves, own.

Which gives this comic its heft and its power. Which serves as a dialogue between artist and viewer. Which makes the reading of Vacancy such a pleasure and provides a small communal event therein.

The experience of Vacancy is one that fills the gap and suffuses the emptiness that its title suggests. It peers through the hole in our fence and fills our minds with the possibilities of what might be on the other side.

You can purchase a copy of Vacancy from Nobrow Press directly by clicking here. 

My Continuing Crisis: Writing on CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS #3

IT CONTINUES...

As some sort of "self-flagellation psychological experiment", I agreed to take part in Comics Bulletin's celebration of the 30th anniversary of DC Comics' FIRST MAJOR CROSSOVER EVENT, Crisis on Infinite Earths.

READ OUR "REVIEW" OF ISSUE #3 HERE.

"It seems like this thing is just coming apart at the seams (which, in a way, makes it kinda seamy). Nobody seems to know what the hell is going on. From The Flash asking, “Wh-what the hell is that?” to Jackie from Easy Company saying, “Somethin’ crazy’s goin’ on here, Rock.” to the Monitor himself stating quite clearly, “There is no answer. Indeed, there can be none.” this book has gone so far off the rails that it’s flipping boxcars, boxcars, boxcars racketing through snow toward lonesome farms in grandfather night…  Who’s Howling here now?

Still, what do you expect from a Crossover Event in which NOTHING WILL EVER BE THE SAME AGAIN?

Clarity? Pfffffffttttt."

Kickstarter Spotlight -- DOCTOR MUSCLES (a graphic novel)

It's been awhile since I wrote about DOCTOR MUSCLES. Not sure if you remember. It was back in November of 2012 when I wrote: 

Every once in a while you come across a book that is so bug-fuck crazy that it fills the rest of your week with pure, unabashed, goofy, knee-twitching glee. Doctor Muscles: Journal One is one of those books. Reading Doctor Muscles is a wild ride: lurching suddenly, hurtling through ambiguity, dropping dangerously into gibberish then soaring into straightforward nutzo.

Anyway.. 

Now they have a Kickstarter to publish "a 450 page graphic novel collecting the entire 15 issue run of the sci-fi action adventure series. If you've already read DOCTOR MUSCLES: Volume One and Two, this omnibus will include Volume Three: 5 brand new issues (150 pages). "

Remember, this is the series I also called:

crap in your pants insanity that is the perfect antidote for dreary thinking and too tight shoes.

So consider backing this project.

OK?

Usual Brutishness: A short review of Emi Gennis' THE UNUSUAL DEATH OF GREGORY BIGGS

Death is an inevitability. All we can hope for when we die is to go with a certain level of dignity intact. What most often robs people of that opportunity is other people.

Other fucking people...

We're inundated and swaddled with horrific, undignified deaths on a daily basis thanks to a constant fecal stream emanating from a journalistic ethos more concerned with ratings than thoughtful, objective reporting. As a culture we become stupefied and callous as we find ourselves mixing up the name of the latest victim of brutality with one who died mere months ago because the list keeps getting longer.

Every. Goddam. Day.

But organized barbarism sometimes pales in the face of the individual act of savagery. Not only can people be horrible to other people, they can exhibit a brutishness and inhumanity that enters uncharted territory because they can, because they do, because they will.

Such is the foundation for Emi Gennis' 2013 mini-comic The Unusual Death of Gregory Biggs. Taken from the Wikipedia List of Unusual Deaths, this brief black and white comic details the horrific events surrounding the 2001 death of Gregory Biggs at the hands of Chante Jawan Mallard.

All fucked up on Ecstacy and other substances, Ms. Mallard smashed her speeding car into Mr. Biggs late one night on US 287, sending him careening half-way through her windshield. In Gennis' telling of the incident, Mallard then proceeded to drive home with Biggs still partly on her passenger seat, alive and asking for help. Parking her car in her garage, she proceeds have sex with her boyfriend, waiting until 9 AM the next morning to do anything about Biggs. Mallard then gets her boyfriend and his cousin to dispose of Biggs' body in a public park.

Three months later she jokingly refers to the incident at a party, and it is then that a someone finally informs the police and Mallard gets arrested for the crime.

While the crime itself is loathsome and beastly, in Gennis' graphic retelling, the images she creates of Biggs' last moments are what give this comic its full emotional gravity. In a comic of only twelve pages, devoting the entirety of one of those pages to this moment could, in the hands of lesser artist, be gratuitous and pandering. But Gennis' has a light touch with her heavy inks, and this page, as it slowly darkens to black, demonstrates the potential of using sequential art to tell a story. Each panel on the page flows ponderously from the previous, slowing time as light fades dimmer and dimmer, the crosshatching gets thicker, as Biggs' eyes are the last bit of white on the page until the final panel is engulfed in total darkness.

You feel this death while looking at this page, the pain of it, the slowness of it, but more importantly, the pointlessness of it.

Gennis does try to show the momentary remorse that Mallard feels at the time of the incident, but contrasted with Mallard's inaction and selfish focus, Gennis gives us Mallard's sad face punctuated by hollow eyes.

As a cartoonist, Gennis hits all the emotional beats in this story perfectly, her art echoes our own disgust with what we are seeing. The backmatter to this book informs us not only what ended up happening to Mallard and her co-conspirators, but also describes in detail many of the choices Gennis herself was faced with as an artist trying to tell this story.

The whole book is riveting because it is true, because of how its told, and because it reminds us that there will always be those among us who are boorish and savage and who think only of themselves no matter what that means for our lives.

Or for our deaths.

You can pick up a copy of The Unusual Death of Gregory Biggs here

A Girl Who Shape-Shifts Into A Boy To Get Her Dream Girl: An Interview with Jennie Wood about FLUTTER

Jennie Wood and Jeff McComsey have a Kickstarter going to support the printing of their LGBTQ indie comic Flutter, Volume 2. Jennie graciously agreed to an interview in which we talk about Flutter, diversity, backlash, hypocrisy, and Kickstarter.

READ THE WHOLE INTERVIEW HERE

"It’s important that we see ourselves in the stories that we put out there. The push for diversity is this need, this desire to see ourselves reflected in comics. The push against it’s from those who fear that they’ll lose their place in it, their reflection. What we need to realize – and all of us need to realize and remind each other of this – is that there’s room for all of us in comics. The audience for comics is growing. At every comic convention I meet more and more people who are there for the first time, exploring comics for the first time."

The Risograph Effect: Reviewing Conor Stechschulte's GENEROUS BOSOM – Part One

After many months, my friend Jason Sacks finally got me to put words to my unclear thoughts concerning Conor Stechschulte's brilliant new book GENEROUS BOSOM part one.

Read the Whole Review Here

Think of something aesthetically profound as the thermal plate. Think of your response to it as the ink. That response, being forced through the voids in the plate as it is, does not make for a lucid response. Something else ends up happening and a writer is left with little other than writing about his or her inability to write anything at all.
Sigh.
Joyce Carol Oates once said, “The first sentence can’t be written until the final sentence is written.” With Generous Bosom, though, because of its pull, I’m trapped in this Risograph Effect. 

My Continuing Crisis: Writing on CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS #2

IT CONTINUES

As some sort of "self-flagellation psychological experiment", I agreed to take part in Comics Bulletin's celebration of the 30th anniversary of DC Comics' FIRST MAJOR CROSSOVER EVENT, Crisis on Infinite Earths.

READ OUR "REVIEW" OF ISSUE #2 HERE.

When you remove the subtly of moral fluidity, when you call people simply heroes tried and true, you grant them the power to do as they will because we trust them to do right, and we’ve all seen how wrong that can go, the horrible things done in the name of What’s Right Black And White.

A Hard Rain's Gunna Fall – Reviewing the New Zealand Comic Anthology FACTION PRESENTS: HIGH WATER

Damon Keen has been editing the consistently impressive New Zealand comic anthology Faction for the past couple of years now. For the new “special” issue, High Water, he once again gathers a diverse group of Kiwi comics creators to tackle a specific topic: Climate Change.

Thematic anthologies are a tricky business, I imagine. Go too long and readers might suffer from theme fatigue; too short and you run the risk of seeming too narrow in your focus. High Water is kind of like the Baby Bear in whatever Goldilocks metaphor I might be constructing here. It's just right.

Still, another problem inherent in gathering a bunch of creators together to interpret the same theme is that there arises the inevitable compulsion to compare each artist's interpretation with the others in the collection. It makes weaker contributions seem that much weaker, though it also pushes the truly original and inventive pieces to the fore.

It takes careful stewardship to keep balance. Keen has done a pretty good job of this in High Water.

Contributors to High Water include Chris Slane, Christian Pearce, Cory Mathis, Dylan Horrocks, Jonathan King, Katie O’Neill, Ned Wenlock, Ross Murray, Sarah Laing, Toby Morris, and Keen himself. It also features additional artwork by Lei Wen, Ant Sang, and an amazing cover by Tim Gibson.

Each artist mostly focuses on the after effects of rising oceans due to climate change. In this future world of water, there is little left for humanity. What is left, though, is a blank page upon which to tell great stories.

While the presentations range from visceral canticles of loss to finger wagging admonitions about the outcome of doing nothing to satirical takes on the root causes of the crisis, each piece still speaks to the core issue. If a change doesn't come soon, a change will be forced upon us.

I'm not going to go into all the pieces in this anthology, but I do want to give a nod to a few that particularly stood out.

First is Sarah Laing's “After the Floods” – Laing's loose style, heavily inked and thickly colored, pulls a reader into a story about the hope that comes in the face of chaos. Pushed against it, the spirit survives and, in bleak times, we still find a way. There is a softness around the edges of this story that are result of its focus on character and possibility.

Katie O’Neill's contribution, “Below the Waves” is far more elegiac in tone. Her manga-inspired static panels are weighted by her dark color palette. There is incredible silence in her pages, mournful in their beauty. Here, what has been lost due to our inaction is the focus, and is all the more palpable due to its inherent universal humanity.

“The Lotus Eaters” is editor Damon Keen's own contribution to the anthology. Told in ten pages, nine of which consist of a three horizontal panel layout and one being a compelling splash page, this mostly wordless comic acts as a time line starting now and projecting far into the future. It, too, speaks of the devastation rising oceans will cause, but it also looks towards a strange kind of hope. In Keen's vision of the future, the world heals itself once it removes the toxic effect of humanity from its surface. Bleak and beautiful at the same time, “The Lotus Eaters” is as immense in its scope as it is quiet in its message.

Finally, Ross Murray's four page story “High Water” is just an absolute thing of beauty. It, too, speaks of a future teeming with ocean life at the expense of humanity. Hushed, breathtaking in its draftsmanship, this piece may be the most striking in the collection. Its communicative power is sweeping and universal. Murray's work here should be shown to every climate change denier as a counterpoint to their madness.

It's good to see an anthology like Faction doing these “special event” type publications. It's also great to see it getting political. It's even better that this anthology allows Kiwi comics creators to reach a wider audience and continue to push the medium forward, accent its expansiveness, and focus its emotional gravity.

Oh yea, there's an introduction by Lucy Lawless too!

You can pick up a copy of High Water at the Faction Website 

DESTINO by Salvador Dali and Walt Disney

CRUSHED INSECTS AND SMALL FISTS: An Examination of LAST MOUNTAIN 2 by Dakota McFadzean

Over on Comics Bulletin, Jason Sacks and I write about Dakota McFadzean's new comic published by Birdcage Bottom Books, LAST MOUNTAIN 2.

YOU CAN READ IT BY CLICKING HERE.

It's one of those reviews that kind of gets away from me. I sort of use the comic as a spring board to talk about other things, specifically the concept of "the other" and issues of mental health.

I guess you could call it more of a rant than a review, but it is what it is and I stand behind what I said.

For example, in it I write:

While our culture has come a long way, it continues to wrestle with mental health issues. It still scares us, unnerves us on a very fundamental level, and what we fear we tend to want far from us. We need safety, desire predictability, need everyone playing by the same set of rules.

How many of us gladly sit next to the woman muttering to herself on the bus? How often do we run into traffic to help the naked man screaming in the middle of the street? 

See what I mean... 

My Crisis: Writing on CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS #1

What Have I Gotten Myself Into?

As some sort of "self-flagellation psychological experiment", I agreed to take part in Comics Bulletin's celebration of the 30th anniversary of DC Comics' FIRST MAJOR CROSSOVER EVENT, Crisis on Infinite Earths.

READ OUR "REVIEW" OF ISSUE #1 HERE.

After reading this first issue, I kinda want to echo the words of that weepy dude who keeps popping up to watch worlds ending while wearing a fetching green cloak and way too much eyeliner. He says, “How much longer must I suffer for my sins… before I may be spared the witnessing of these horrors?”. Because this beast of a book sure is one scrum of a story, a pile-on to mirror (or mask) some sort of Homeric intent.

So… how much longer must I suffer?

Oh, that’s right. There’s twelve issues. One whole year of Crisis.

Pffffftttttt….. This is not going to end well for me.

The Universe Is About To Be Born Again: A Short Review Of A GRAPHIC COSMOGONY from Nobrow Press

Back in 2010, London based publishing house Nobrow Press printed a 176 page, four color hardback anthology called A Graphic Cosmogony in which “twenty four artists take on seven pages each to tell their tales of the creation of everything...” and, thankfully, it's just recently come back into print.

It's sublime, meditative, resplendent, and just that good. While it certainly highlights the individual contributors within its pages, it also stands as a testament to the innate power that can arise out of a carefully curated anthology

As with most Nobrow releases, A Graphic Cosmogony is a thing of beauty, elegantly crafted. The anthology hovers in that liminal space between an art book and a comic book, as each creator brings to their seven pages a unique understanding and depiction of the myth of creation. Ranging from the traditional to the surreal, profound to the comical, each presentation could exist as a mini-comic on its own. Put together, though, they gain a further layer of meaning through their juxtaposition, commenting, in a way, on the work that proceeds and follows. While some artists are more successful than others, taken as a whole each piece becomes a necessary part of the larger puzzle. Out of the cacophony and chaos implicit in twenty four voices singing their own interpretation of a similar theme, editor Alex Spiro and assistant editor Ben Newman craft a work that fills the room with a pitch perfect orgiastic canticle, a nuanced symphony to exult the senses.

In his introduction to the anthology, Paul Gravett writes, “what better means than comics, the distillation of illuminated manuscripts, tapestries, meditational paintings and decorated scrolls and all of humanities’ narrative arts, to tell that oldest story of them all, the story of creation?” When artists deal with ideas surrounding creation myths, one can't help but see them commenting on their understanding of their own process as well, the fundamentals of creativity, the machinations of art, the work inherent in forming inspiration into product. As each artist tells their own myth of creation, they also give the reader insight into their own ideas about creating.

The list of contributors is impressive: Stuart Kolakovic, Mikkel Sommers, Brecht Vandenbroucke, Luke Best, Rob Hunter, Jon McNaught, Ben Newman, Andrew Rae, Luke Pearson, Jack Teagle, Jon Boam, Jakob Hindrichs, Clayton Junior, Daniel Locke, Isabel Greenberg, Mike Bertino, Nick White, Rui Tenreiro, Sean Hudson, Luc Melanson, Katia Fouquet, Yeji Yun, Matthew Lyons, and Liesbeth De Stercke. Each artist demonstrates their nuance of storytelling while also highlighting their particular style. The anthology speaks to the myriad possibilities comics have in terms of narrative, representation, tone, and craft.

A Graphic Cosmogony is a book, first and foremost. The tactile experience of turning each thick page becomes integral to the experience of consumption. The very texture and weight of the paper and the push back of its tight binding make reading A Graphic Cosmogony so much more immersive then tapping on a tablet or scrolling with a mouse. Even its surprising lightness, given that it is a 176 page hardback book, makes reading the anthology a physical event. It's what Nobrow, as a publisher, does best.

Paul Gravett ends his introduction to A Graphic Cosmogony by writing, “Pull up a rock and gather round the flickering fire - the universe is about to be born again…” This is a thing to enjoy. This is an anthology you should experience for yourself.

You can purchase A Graphic Cosmogony from Nobrow Press HERE.