The Complete Ouija Interviews
by Sarah Becan
Shortpants Press

I pity the ghoul who hasn’t played with a Ouija board.  Sometimes they’re unresponsive but more often they’re eerily insightful and communicative.

My cousins and I once made a Ouija board, drawing the appropriate letters and numbers on the back of some other board game and using the lid off a heart-shaped box as the planchette.  Believe it or not, you don’t need Milton Bradley to manufacture a Ouija board.  Pretty much any style board will do.  And really, because we made our pitiful board from our own tools and youthful cunning, it was even more thrilling than it ought to have been when the ghosts started talking to us.

In this Xeric Award-winning book, Sarah Becan illustrates real conversations with dead people that she and others had using a Ouija board in Nantucket.  Why Nantucket?  Well, although the island’s small size apparently makes it a magnet for ghosts, Becan was drawn there because her brother worked in a Nantucket hostel.  Still, after learning a thing or two about ghostly romances in the after-life, I’m inclined to think a certain limerick is to blame for all the dead in Nantucket.

The Complete Ouija Interviews seems a little misleading as a title.  The interviews are pretty brief and there are roughly nine total.  The interviews are spaced to one panel per page too, so the whole 192 pages really fly by.  Each conversation is satisfying in its own way, but I could have probably read twice as many interviews before I’d really be ready to call this a “complete” book.  Of course, I’m sure this is a complete representation of all her Ouija interviews, but it would be interesting to see her take on other people’s interviews too in follow-up Ouija Interview books.

The interviewees were made up of the recent and long-deceased, men and women, children and adults, siblings and *shiver* parents.  They were overwhelmingly comprised of murder victims and one of the ghosts proclaimed that much of the after-life is spent just fucking around.  Uh, literally.

Although most of the ghosts were murdered, they still seem so upbeat about the lives they lived and the after-life too.  Even though this book seems like it could be truly scary, the message of the ghosts is actually weirdly affirming.  I’ll admit it’s comforting to think that even if the world ended today there would be something to do tomorrow.  And it’s encouraging also to hear the advice of the dead repeated in so many words, in so many ways, again and again, “Live it up.”

Something that really surprised me about the interviews is that they were just that — interviews.  The human players quoted in the book never ask the ghosts to predict their future; they simply ask questions about the after-life and the past-lives of the dead.  I’m not sure if there was some editing involved, but I really liked this approach for the book.  I think it’s natural for people at the Ouija board to look for answers that will help them in their individual lives, but for this kind of book it would have been really disruptive to the narrative and even boring to hear ghosts answer questions about who the players will marry or where they’ll live someday.  Happily, these stories come directly from the ghosts to the reader in such a way that permits us to make our own interpretation of the text, instead of enforcing and preferring the response of the players.

Becan’s approach to the book cuts out the players almost entirely, actually.  The living are not even illustrated, just the dead.  The ghosts appear in such a unique and lovely way too.  She is able to imprint a bit of personality on the dead, but her art’s not so forced that she’s puppeting their appearance for reader response.  Her art facilitates the words more like a clear glass would a glass of wine.  Each illustration perfectly balancing the nature and personality of that particular ghost with their statements, presenting it in its most harmless and truthful way.  Some of the ghosts are funny and some of them are somber, but none of them are very scary.  It could be that Becan’s lovely, communicative art takes some of that edge off of these shocking tales, but it works because it makes the dead more like the living in a weird yet palpable way.

The Complete Ouija Interviews by Sarah Becan is available for purchase through the Shortpants Press online store.  It measures 5″x6″, is perfect-bound, has a debossed cover, brown-hued interior pages, and costs $10.

- Sarah Morean

Blammo 2
by Noah Van Sciver
Self-Published

In Blammo 2, Noah Van Sciver promotes his favorite bands, tells crude jokes, and mouths off about irritating trends polluting Denver, CO. It’s a notably zine-like comic for all its variety, education and filth – and it’s kind of a hoot.

Noah Van Sciver, it must be told, is the brother of mainstream comic artist Ethan Van Sciver. It’s a funny notion that two brothers could be the yin and yang of comics – one serious, straight and published, the other comical, expressive and indie – and that’s just what Noah seems to be. He’s making indie comics so quintessential in form, they seem entirely opposed to what’s mainstream and completely illustrative of the underground with all its rage, comedy and wince-inducing details.

The book contains four real and imagined conversations with Van Sciver’s favorite artistic heroes, including Anton Newcombe of The Brian Jonestown Massacre, Kristin Gundred of Grand Ole Party, Joe Matt and Bob Dylan. The Joe Matt interview is hilarious, since it’s mostly three pages of Matt’s well-known rambling style prompted by a hand-held microphone. The Matt interview covers such topics as collecting things, the importance of Bob Dylan, and taking drugs at Comic-Con ‘87.

Some of the book tackles Noah’s real-life situations, which are awkward or irritating, but not very funny on their own. It’s clearly supposed to be a fun comic book, and when he distorts reality or writes fiction, that’s where his talent is best expressed. Most of the book is fictional, including stories about strangers or strange haunted sofas or a bagel guy who hates his job or a bothersome homeless guy, but he also includes letters to the artist and the interviews – so it’s really a mixed bag in terms of content. Artistically, though, it’s obviously all coming from the same place. Personally, this is my favorite alternative to books penned by a single author and illustrated by multiple artists. The common style helps visually to tie everything together.

Noah’s pages are full of boney, bedraggled misfits that fill square panels on gridlocked pages. The drawings are cross-hatched and spot-colored with grays and everything feels very urban and filthy and underground. It’s a really nice style for the kind of stories he tells, it just fits. What’s better, is that for as packed as the square panels are, the drawings and text fit soundly together. They don’t tend to knock each other around and compete for space, which creates problems in other comics. The style and stories and design of the thing are really in harmony. I think the best step for Noah to take now is to further stretch the truth to create even more filthy and fictitious stories. Writing fiction’s a talent, but writing filthy jokes and stories is kind of a master realm of comics, where the respected legion of cartoonists dwell, and Noah’s on his way there.

The book is 6.5×10.25″, 32 pages long and available for $4 on Noah’s website.

- Sarah Morean