Inner City Romance by Guy Colwell
An interesting 70s undergound series collected by Fantagraphics. Colwell comes from a painting background, and has done comics only sporadically, which might explain why this has such a unique feel compared to other undergrounds. Its 5 issues are all quite distinct from one another, too, with varying degrees of success, but even in the parts that don't work so well it's obvious that Colwell is experimenting and pushing at the boundaries of this form he's dabbling in, with interesting effects. All of these stories are concerned with urban life - race, poverty, prison (Colwell himself spent time for resisting the Vietnam draft), sexuality, drugs, the police, the government. The best issues are probably the last 2. Issue #4 focuses on a tenement where the corrupt city government has installed wheelchair ramps - not to improve conditions but cynically so they can meet some bare minimum requirements and shove even more helpless, poor people into conditions that are otherwise intolerable. It's especially notable for the pages where Colwell slows down time to focus on a poor kid skateboarding and falling to his death, breaking down the action panel by panel and eventually getting near-abstract in visualizing the kid's inner life as he approaches his end. The final issue, which is a series of short stories showing multiple forms of sex - from banal drug-infused hookup to horrifying assault to utopian expression of freedom - is also quite good, especially in the way Colwell varies his style with each story's tone. Not everything here is so great: issue #2, a "musical" about a benefit concert where all the dialogue is sung in verse, is pretty corny in a way quite familiar from other counterculture artifacts, though even there Colwell seems to have more of an edge than most similar works. More generally, some of the racial material is uncomfortable, not necessarily in a good way. Colwell undoubtedly has his heart in the right place but there's something jarring about some of his depictions of black people, particularly the exaggerated dialects he writes for them. (Funny enough, he also beat Kanye West to the "free at last" sex joke by a few decades.) Colwell seems to take pride in the fact that his comics have made some people think he was actually black, but that too seems a little... off. Still, despite its problems this is fascinating work, and Colwell's fluid, realistic, only slightly cartoony art is well-suited to these gritty, socially provocative stories.
Knife Crime by Simon Hanselmann
New Megg & Mogg mini, continuing the absolute curdling of Hanselmann's aesthetic into something brutal and bitter. I find the laughs increasingly stick in my throat while reading his newer books, and though I maybe miss the over-the-top good times of earlier Megg & Mogg, I think he's getting at something incredibly raw and real in comics like this. This powerfully captures a disintegrating relationship, the awkward silences and depressing empty times. It's still funny, still has the nasty edge of all his comics, and the just plain absurd moments, but the weird visualizations of depression and aimlessness - like Megg standing in an empty room, imitating a clock with her arms and intoning "tick" - are taking over. Really excited for/dreading
Bad Gateway.
Passage by Tessa Brunton
Somewhat randomly picked up this old Sparkplug book, apparently Brunton's first published comic, and really enjoyed it. Reminds me of Debbie Drechsler, though (at least for most of its length) a lot lighter, this quirky coming-of-age autobio piece about the author remembering her parents' oddball family traditions, and especially a goofy, embarassing "manhood ceremony" they planned for her older brother. Very charming, genuinely funny, and when some darker undercurrents do burble up it's handled very well. What's most impressive is how it spends most of its length playing its situations for absurd comedy, only to pull the rug out with some deeper introspection at the end, and it makes the shift without ever seeming gimmicky.
ROM by Josh Bayer
Bayer does a cover version of a Bill Mantlo/Sal Buscema ROM comic. An interesting exercise - I haven't read the original but based on the actual panels he reprints here, it seems like Bayer stays pretty faithful to the plot, while loosening up the art considerably into this murky style focused on mark-making rather than clarity. Pretty enjoyable, especially when Bayer follows it up with a short story about a kid who reads these old Marvel comics, gets scolded by his mom, and gets mocked by other kids. That epilogue, as well as the post-script about the tragic accident that left ROM writer Mantlo comatose and brain damaged, provides the emotional context for Bayer's experimentation with this material.
Raw Power #1-2 by Josh Bayer
In contrast, I feel like this has stronger art than Bayer's ROM but is basically unreadable in every other respect. As pure mark-making it's pretty cool to just look at, like a looser, sloppier version of Blutch's inky noir comics. But the story - which skips around a lot but mostly involves a caricatured uber-conservative version of G. Gordon Liddy and a Batman-like antihero who dresses as a cat and beats up punk rockers - is really incoherent and the writing is such a chore to read. It's also pretty mean-spirited, at times homophobic, and gorily violent to no real effect. Terrible.
How to Make Comics by Caitlin Skaalrud
Not an actual how-to, but a series of wry meditations and faux-advice on the subject of fitting art into a life of romantic entanglements and deadening low-pay jobs. Skaalrud arranges a series of striking full-page images, alternately realistic and fanciful, to create this amusing, thought-provoking piece on the self-imposed demands of the artist's life. Very good use of disjunctions between word and image.
Acorns & Pebbles / Cats In Service by Megan Kelso
I had thought Kelso basically stopped doing comics after Artichoke Tales so I was happy to find out recently that she'd done a couple of minis in the years since, and that they're still easily bought. The former has one real story, "The Golden Lasso," which is an elliptical story about coming of age, laced with ambiguity and possible menace in the things left unsaid between panels/moments. The rest of the mini is some paintings and doodles. The real treat it turns out is Cats In Service, which sounds absolutely ridiculous in concept, but like so many of Kelso's stories has this surprising depth and nuance to it. Kelso's cartooning is so clean and clear, it's always tempting to think she's a "simple" cartoonist, but there's nothing straightforward about the way she lets this absurd scenario play out and keep accumulating emotional significance that's hard to actually describe or pin down. It's what I've always loved in her work - the tension between the clarity and elegance of her cartooning, and the ambiguous web of feelings and ideas conjured up from beneath the surface.
Disorder #1 by Erika Price
I've read some good comics lately but this is the pick of this batch, a new mini put out by Carta Monir's Diskette Press, apparently collecting a
webcomic. This is remarkable stuff, an intense, inky black descent into psychological/physiological horror, expressing feelings of disgust and destruction regarding the body. Alternating between wordless sections and stream-of-consciousness abstract poetic texts, this is constantly inventive and frightening and powerful, a scream of anguish in every jagged form. Parts recall Mat Brinkmann and, I dunno, Tool music videos, but the overall aesthetic and atmosphere is uniquely Price's.
Sound of Snow Falling / 270° by Maggie Umber
A pair of books about owls from one of the heads of 2D Cloud. The first is a silent narrative following an owl couple throughout a season as they nest, breed, hunt, and hatch their young ones. In feel it's like a nature documentary with the narration turned off, and it's totally beautiful. Umber's painted images tend towards dull, dark hues, with subtle shadings of color within the darkness. It's a nighttime book, a book of shadowy forms flitting through the dark. Her storytelling is rock-solid despite the silence and the impassive protagonists. A very calming book, as well as an interesting experiment in crafting narratives from nature. The second book is looser and in some ways more experimental - it's a mixed media collage of images and text - but in others way more traditional. Basically a set of owl facts in dry text, accompanied by some very expressive imagery of owls and nature. Not bad but nowhere near as engaging and poetic as its predecessor.