Driven by Lemons
By Joshua Cotter
Adhouse
There’s nothing new, of course, in the idea of issuing one’s sketchbook for the world to see. The release of Robert Crumb and Chris Ware’s volumes helped set the bar for modern, commercially released cartoonist sketchbooks, and a handful of books, including, most recently Peter Kuper’s Diario de Oaxaca and Al Columbia’s Pim & Francie: The Golden Bear Days, have helped redefined the parameters of the space.
Where once sketchbooks were conceived of as private works—the visual equivalent, perhaps, of a personal diary—the line has since been blurred. Today a sketchbook can prove every bit as successful a commercial endevour as a graphic novel, so it should come as no surprise that contemporary artists often begin them with the ultimate goal of releasing them largely intact.
Joshua Cotter showed me Driven By Lemons for the first time in an uncompleted form at SPX 2008. I had been downright ecstatic in my praise of Skyscrapers of the Midwest, and in a couple of months would place the book atop my year end list. Cotter happily presented a little sketchbook with methodically detailed pages, fluttering between narrative and abstraction. It was a downright sight to behold, even while a good chunk of its pages remained blank.
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Smile
By Raina Telgemeier
Graphix
There are few things so universal in a young person’s life as a fear of the dentist. Even for those who have managed to coast by with little more than a twice-yearly cleaning, there’s a certain dread that inevitably comes with entire process. While Raina Telgemeier insists in her author’s note that she’s “not afraid of dentists or dental work,” one can only imagine the effect that the artist’s own real-life “dental drama” had on her formative years.
In a sense, her own experiences in the world of dentistry were rather atypical, a fairly straightforward experience with the orthodontist having been hijacked when she tripped and fell on the way to a friend’s house, knocking out her two front teeth. What followed were several years of increasingly complex dental procedures–a slew of retainers, false teeth, and professionals with unpronouncable job descriptions, save for the ever-familiar -dontist suffix. In all, it’s enough to make the vast majority of us thankful for our relatively painless experiences in the dentist’s chair.
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UTU
by Malachi Ward
Self-published
It seems weirdly appropriate to review this book on Christmas Eve. I hope you will enjoy the irony.
UTU is beautiful comic book set in two worlds: the highly techno-savvy future and the mystical, superstitious past. The book’s author Malachi Ward claims it is his “finest and only work to date.” For a first comic, I’d say it’s pretty ambitious, but successful. Definitely worth a look.
UTU is about a guy who is able to move between time periods, but has no control over either. In 5102 B.C.E. he is the god of gods, UTU, who nobody seems to respect, and in the future he is just some lonely guy who can’t even pull a girl at the bar.
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Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary
By Justin Green
McSweeney’s
“It’s nice to have accolades,” writes the author, in the afterword to this latest edition, “even if they are not quite true.” Justin Green is being modest, of course. The past 37 years have, perhaps, taught the artist how to accept a compliment—even if he doesn’t entirely buy into its validity. But even with just under four decades’ worth of lauds, there’s no doubt still something downright overwhelming in McSweeney’s lovingly compiled tribute to Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary.
Let’s start, naturally, with the back cover, wherein, of the four names present, Chris Ware is unquestionable the least well known. The indie comics god gladly caps off his blurb with the words “Thank God for Binky Brown. And Thank God for Justin Green.” Robert Crumb similarly gushes, writing, in part, “Justin Green is the first and the best!” The exclamation mark is his. The other two quotes? They’re not verbose—or earnest—but, well, they’re from Kurt Vonnegut and Federico Fellini.
And then there’s the matter of the foreword, penned by Art Spiegelman, a long time Green fan who in many ways helped proved the impetus for this book. The Maus author, it seems, has some difficulty keeping his enthusiasm for the work to a single page.
For those of us who entered the fray long after Binky Brown first went out of print, such unbridled passion from the pens of heroes is perhaps a touch overwhelming—especially on the heels of years of critical fawning for the work that “started it all.”
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Getting There/Getting Where
by Robyn Jordan
Naptime Press
Getting There/Getting Where is an autobiographical comic by Robyn Jordan. The topics addressed are (generally) jury duty, acquaintances and riding the subway.
This mini is short and sweet. Just a simple little 16-page collection of stories from a cartoonist who is able to tell pleasantly compact stories and lay out an attractive page of art.
Even if the admittedly mundane subject matter doesn’t interest you, I’m certain that Getting There/Getting Where will pique any reader’s interest in Jordan’s work.
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Vatican Hustle
By Greg Houston
NBM
Leafing through piles of comics, it’s become clear that, over the past couple of years, countless writers have begun to view sequential art as a gateway to other, more profitable mediums. Hollywood studios, after all, have long been trolling the Internet in search of the next major propriety—and really, who can blame them? The well of television remakes has largely dried up, while superhero books and graphic novels have proven a seemingly endless source of revenue.
Ultimately what we, the comics readers, are left with are a illustrated screenplays, extended storyboards, proofs of concepts bound and sold through the direct market. The vast majorities of these books don’t deserve a second look. Poor movie pitches make for even poorer graphic novels—particularly when penned by writers who have no devotion to the form beyond its recognized potential as a springboard to bigger and better things.
And then there are comics like Vatican Hustle. Greg Houston’s book isn’t so much a movie pitch, so much as a warped adolescent fantasy of what genre film might be in some forgotten era when Civil War re-enactors attacked leperous clown servants and no one though twice when you kicked the shit out the evil pop in the midst of one of his signature orgies.
Vatican Hustle is a love letter to the blacksploitation genre penned in the only manner such a note can successfully be executed: way the hell over the top. There are melting mobsters, flying holy men—even Charles Manson makes a brief, drug-induced appearance—and in the middle of it all a giant afroed, platform-shoed badass battling corruption in the epicenter of Catholicism.
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Strange Suspense: The Steve Ditko Archive Vol. 1
Edited by Blake Bell
Fantagraphics
It’s difficult know how to approach Strange Suspense. As a relic? An oddity? A supplementary biography of one of the medium’s truly warped innovators? Given its physical context and the time and works that have elapsed since the stories contained herein were initially published, it’s tough–if not impossible–to approach these stories at they were first meant to be appreciated, under the sheets with a flashlight, as a young lad, in the early 50s, as the industry underwent its own version of the McCarthy trials, in what must have seemed a world away.
This isn’t to say that Fantagraphics hasn’t done a great job in this restoration. Like the rest of their titles, this first volume in the Steve Ditko archives is beautifully packaged and restored—but its precisely that restoration that distances these stories from the original pulp floppies in which they were originally presented. Gone are the ads for assorted novelties, and the $0.10 cover price has since been replaced with a backcover $39.99 UPC.
Like many of the company’s reprints, Strange Suspense’s primary appeal seems to exist at some crossroads between nostalgia and those completists who don’t possess sufficient funds to shell out $400 per back issue. Children of the early Cold War who grew up with a pre-Spider-man Ditko will find plenty to love in these restorations, which faithfully keeps intact the four-color printings errors of the books’ original pages. Editor Blake Bell doesn’t attempt to impose an editorial hand in the process, either. Aside from a quick introduction, the book contains no supplementary text. Bell clearly got that out of his system with last year’s Strange and Stranger.
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Pim & Francie: The Golden Bear Days
By Al Columbia
Fantagraphics
What ever happened to Al Columbia? The answers, hopefully, are not found on these pages. If they are, the truth is positively terrifying. Pim & Francie: The Golden Bear Days is a downright sadistic journey through the lives of its titular characters, playing out like fragments of a fairytale, had the rawer stories of yesteryear from the likes of the Brothers Grimm been followed to their logical conclusions in the context of our hyper-graphic society, rather than having been hijacked by the likes of Walt Disney.
The children are dismembered, run through meat grinders, overtaken by giant insects in their sleep. Pim & Francie is a bit of a hard covered horror show, which, in spite of Columbia’s early century cartooning style and a sadistic tendency to bring the characters to life at the beginning of each subsequent strip, does not adhere to basic principles of rubber cartoon physics.
Pim and Francie are doing the jitterbug in their living room. Pim dips Francies and tosses her in the air. He misses her on the way down. She snaps her neck. He stares, horrified, and runs down a fantasy montage, which culminates with his being hanged, black bag over his head, torches of the townspeople silhouetted against the night. Understandably fearing this, Pim takes drastic measures, stuffing Francie into a suitcase and disposing of her in a swamp.
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Ochre Ellipse #3
by Jonas Madden-Connor
Family Style
It’s difficult to say something new about the simplicity and preciousness of youth, but in Ochre Ellipse #3, I believe Jonas Madden-Connor has done it.
Childhood is such a primitive, potent time in a person’s life; it’s no wonder that memories from that time eventually become lore. In the hands of a capable storyteller, otherwise common occurrences like bullying become rich, comedic, thought-provoking tales that offer a “new” perspective on growing up.
But that’s not what I mean when I say that Madden-Connor’s latest mini-comic offers unique take on youth. What I mean to say is that, while most authors weave wisdom into chaos, they are still showing us a familiar thing that, ultimately, we relate to because those things have happened to us. Most stories operate on the need for audience projection — people seeing themselves in the work, empathizing and liking it — but this is a device that Ochre Ellipse #3 cleverly sidesteps. It finds other interesting ways of making its point about youth, memory and nostalgia.
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Cat Burglar Black
By Richard Sala
First Second Books
Surveying the world of sequential art over the past couple of decades, it’s difficult not to bemoan the contemporary state of comics for kids. The late 80s was the beginning of the end for the happy arrested development of superhero books, which, for once, began to grow up with their audience, thanks to likes of Alan Moore and Frank Miller.
What started as a break from the pack soon grew into the industry standard, as the books that once wholeheartedly embraced the restrictions of the industry nearly all adopted a “gritty realism,” in an attempt to keep up with the R rated action films, which were quickly stealing away their audience.
Of course, even during this period, facets of the industry were still attempting to draw a young readership, but these titles largely suffered on the other side of the censorship spectrum, offering the manner of over-safe affair that has been allowed to flourish in this post-Disney society.
For a number of years, very little middle ground has existed between these two extremes, and few in the industry have allowed creativity to flourish in the kids’ market. The manner of weird and wonderful books that so enthralled and engaged us in our own childhoods have largely vanished from the landscape. Over the past couple of years, however, something has happened—there’s been a minor renaissance in the world of kids comics, a youthful microcosm of the industry at large.
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Reviews | bheater January 20, 2010 | 
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