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.

Ochre Ellipse #3 is set in a world where time travel is commonplace.  So much so that, for a fee, you can time travel as an invisible observer to any point in history, and for a higher fee, you can create your own time line.  It’s a business that operates about as casually as a sandwich shop, so the fact that the protagonist uses the service often isn’t really surprising.  Time travel as entertainment.  At least, that’s the idea.

Instead, the main guy continues to travel back to his childhood.  Repeatedly.  Over and over.  He goes back to the same memory, looking for clues that will lead him to where he went wrong in his life.  He once was a solitary happy kid, but now he’s a solitary unhappy adult.  Why?  How could he learn to be happy again?

He’s only paid for the standard travel package, which merely includes watching and not interacting with the past, but even so, he begins to feel more and more like an integral part of his surroundings the more he visits.  Each time he returns, he plays a new part in his boyhood self’s imaginary world.  He’s having fun, and it’s the most touching transformation that I have seen in a comic all year.

I’ve been thinking for a long time about the formula for popular children’s movies (underdog rises high and gets the girl) and whether or not kids actually like that stuff.  I don’t know any kids, but rely on the wisdom of King Mini (father of one) who recently, unintentionally, laid it out for me.  Kids need to use their imagination, and that’s what most kids movies don’t permit.  Using your imagination is kind of the antithesis of being shown a formulaic film, or training yourself to behave in a way that will get girls or boys to like you.  Having an imagination can be a very isolating experience at times, but that doesn’t mean it and happiness are mutually exclusive, as I re-learned in Madden-Connor’s book.

Plenty of stories have been written about adults learning to believe again, or whatever the adult version of “play” and “imagination” may be, but those plots are often over-stuffed with hokey love stories and bit roles for funnymen.  After awhile, they all look the same.  Madden-Connor’s book is just so purely about this one thing that it feels remarkably unlike its counterparts in the genre.  No matter what your own experience has you read into this book, you’re guaranteed to be swept up in its spell.  For me at least, the experience was really rare.

Ochre Ellipse #3 is excellent.  Hands down one of the best books I’ll read all year.  Add it to your Holiday Wish List.  It’s 40 pages long, black and white pages, displays an awesome library sci fi sticker on the cover, and can be purchased for $5 through Global Hobo or $4 through Family Style.

- Sarah Morean

Isotope Award 2009 from Sarah Morean on Vimeo.

I’ve often thought of independent comics as the great social equalizer. By this I mean that no indie cartoonist or fan walking alone into a room full of similar stock should be able to leave without a friend. My estimation of indie comics, it seems, was too naive. See, until last weekend, I’d never been further west than Denver. The indie shows I’d seen were packed with internet acquaintances, kind artists recalling my fan letters, and other Midwesterners. In other words, people that I already knew. I’d been biased, for sure.

Going to APE for the first time, I learned that the west coast scene is so large, it can very easily make you feel like an outsider — especially when you are.  There are enough west coast shows to occupy a creator’s time, and due to the cost of travel, I don’t think many west coast creators appearing at APE, Stumptown and the San Francisco Zine Fest also feel the need to exhibit at MoCCA, SPX or SPACE (AKA shows I might attend).  This is one reason why it’s a good idea to get into California once in awhile.  Otherwise, you might never meet these cartoonists.  However, it’s also a possible explanation for why the Friday night mixer at Last Gasp was such a rough place meet people.  If they all know each other already, then why should they care about you when they have no idea who you are?

Last Gasp is basically a warehouse. It’s expansive and full of great media, so if there was a friendly face to be found, it was likely in a book.  At least the bartender was hospitable, despite the fact that the two heaping bowls of dried fruit he pushed on revelers remained largely untouched. I took his good attitude — sustained in spite of constant fruit bowl rejection — as a sign not to give up.

"I like your mustache."

I attended APE with Will Dinski, who by Friday already had an inkling that his book Covered in Confusion would be the winner of the 2009 Isotope Award.  We’d been tipped off long ago by veteran Isotope recipient Max Riffner that the Isotope winner is not “suddenly announced” the day of, but is contacted ahead of time to insure the recipient’s attendance at the show and subsequent ceremony.  When Will got an email on Thursday saying he was a finalist, and would he be around, it was kind of a big deal.  I had a lot of trouble keeping the news under wraps.  We later learned that he won “in a landslide” to quote the judges, which means that Covered in Confusion made the top 5 of each of the judges’ lists.  While we stood around at Last Gasp on Friday night being unpopular, we joked quietly, awkwardly, about what would happen once he was revealed as the winner on Saturday night.  We predicted some confused silence and a disappointed crowd.  “Who is this guy?  Who does he think he is winning our awards on our turf?  Don’t California’s confusing seller’s licenses preclude that sort of thing?”  Ha?  Cough.

After walking the circuit at Last Gasp, we luckily made the acquaintance of Simon Gardenfors and his posse, which was comprised of Robin Enrico and a girl I’ll only remember as “The Boss.”  Gardenfors is an autobio cartoonist and America’s next great Swedish import.  The English translation of his book 120 Days of Simon is due out from Top Shelf next year.

The tone set by the Last Gasp mixer made me nervous for the first day of APE. It was a bit disorienting, kind of elitist, quickly out of beer, and promptly closed (as advertised) at 9pm.

We wound up asleep on Friday at an all-too reasonable hour, and arrived early to APE on Saturday morning to set the table.  The view of the floor that morning though was fantastic. It seemed like the exhibitors setting up ASAP had the most large and exciting displays.  Very impressive.  But even those creators that wowed me in the beginning kind of faded away by the afternoon, because once all the tables were full and the floor was buzzing with attendees, they just blended in with the rest.

The much coveted tiger print.

It would be very difficult to stand out at APE.  Most creators agreed that the space held too many tables and didn’t lure in enough attendees.  Also at APE, rumor has it that nobody makes much of a profit.  It’s fine, but the average creator’s haul is below what they’d take in at other comparable shows.  Of course, considering the low table cost, I wonder if it evens out in the end.  Since I wasn’t really exhibiting (apart from the Cross Hatch bags) I saw APE as a good place to go and get ideas that I could take back to smaller shows, or craft fairs in my hometown.  Even the worst display at APE would probably be the best display at most conventions, because at APE the bar for eye-catching graphics and display gear is set pretty high.

Because APE comes on the heels of a very busy convention season, its identity seems to be a a mash-up of the past several months of big conventions.  I thought, if it wasn’t all comics, it would be all hand-made books and ironic t-shirts, but forgot to consider that it’s a west coast show.  Pretty much anyone already primed to sell in California is who you’ll find at APE, so you see some more mainstream items — like zombie and pin-up girls — that seem a little out of place but definitely have their audience.  Certain ideas trickle down from the big shows into APE, simmer over the winter, and leak out re-imagined next season.  APE is part of the great circle of regeneration within the indie comics medium, but it would be a tough show to table year after year, given the sales and gargantuan floor space.

I even had a tough time giving my Cross Hatch bags away.  I’m a lousy salesperson, but c’mon.  Free handmade bags?  I was even turned down by a guy with his hands full of stuff he could barely carry.  If I had it rough, I don’t envy the real exhibitors.

The Isotope Award Ceremony was a lot of fun.  Before the bar opened Will and I ran into Top Shelf’s Brett Warnock, the night’s temporary bartender.  He had just gone out of his way to find a pepper for the margaritas and was headed back to Isotope when we crossed paths.  It seems Warnock has tended bar before, so he obviously knows what’s up, but I’d never heard of the pepper-margarita marriage, and I was pretty excited to try it.  In the middle of our stop-and-chat, Brett took the pepper from its paper bag, gave it a discerning look, nipped a small bite off the end, and rolled his eyes — it wasn’t hot at all.  It was like they’d given him the most tepid pepper in the store, made and sold especially for gringos.  He was obviously having none of that.  I’m not sure if the pepper ever made it into the margarita, but my margarita was tasty regardless.

Will and I were still pretty much wallflowers by the time the Isotope Award was given away, but just watch the video at the top of this post to see how quickly that changed.  It wasn’t so much the quiet arm-crossing response we’d expected; it was more like a deafening love fest.  Thanks to Nate Beaty for his incredible, immediate kindness from day one and Jonas Madden-Connor (Isotope winner 2008) and Francois Vigneault of Family Style for the same.  They are all good dudes to know, which is good, because they were the only people we knew at Isotope before the announcement was made.

Francois Vigneault and Jonas Madden-Connor doing "the turkey."

After many surreal hours of strangers taking photographs of my boyfriend and a long battle with sleepiness in the upstairs reading room, where I was able to re-read some of my favorite minis like Disquietville #2 and Shithole, we were finally transported back to our hotel by a guy who looked like Racetrack Higgins from “Newsies.”  No kidding.  “Higgins” later reported that the party went on until 4am until it broke for donuts at a 24-hour shop.  Guess it’s true what they say about west coast parties.

Sunday at APE was much like Saturday at APE except that Lilli Carre and her latest Little Otsu print were nowhere to be found, there was a trophy on our table, and suddenly the on-site bar didn’t look so appealing.

BYO boot glass to the Isotope Award Ceremony.

On Sunday, I went around taking photos with my $10 digital “spy camera” from Walgreens, but sadly lost it all due to incompetence.

For more photographs of APE, check out the following links:
Nate Beaty
Fantagraphics
Laughing Squid
lobraumeister
Alternative Press Expo flickr group
Will Dinski

For more photos of the Isotope Award Ceremony, check out the following links:
James Sime
DJ Bearzbub

- Sarah Morean

Ochre Ellipse #2
By Jonas Madden-Connon
Family Style

Start with something simple: unrequited love. A cashier at a supermarket–Mercet. She’s small and full-bodied and rosy-cheeked. She works the checkout line Mondays through Thursdays and on Saturday afternoons. Our momentary protagonist is, to say the least, enamored. He meanders through the supermarket, tossing groceries into his basket that he never plans on purchasing, to avoiding looking suspicious. It’s a basic conceit–one sure to be incredibly familiar to anyone who has read their share of indie books.

For Jonas Madden-Connor, however, this base plotline feels like more of a sandbox, a safe environment in which to try out a multitude of ideas, something that Ochre Ellipse is clearly not lacking, a point made abundantly clear by turning to nearly any of the book’s 29 CD booklet-sized pages. Madden-Connor’s scenes employ a unique sense of depth, a camera trained 3/4 overhead, on a plane to which even his character’s speech bubbles adhere. The panels that retain them, while present on nearly ever page, dissolve or shift, a friendly reminder that, while the artist is still content to use them as a tool with which to tell his story, they are simply that–a means to an end, rather than a necessity. Objects on the store’s shelves are also fodder for the story, adapting their text to form streams of thoughts that project our unrequited narrator’s inner-monologue.

Nearly every storytelling device, Madden-Connor soon makes it clear, is little more than that–a tool at the artist’s disposal, and all are expendable for the sake of visual storytelling: layout, narrative, even his characters’ identities. “See, I draw myself as a mynah bird,” explains a bird-headed, hoodie-wearing character, sitting on a BART train, describing the mini-comic in his hand, which, it seems also contains the events leading up to the story’s present moment. Further explanation naturally sets up the next scene, wherein the flip of a page finds German scientist Ernst Haeckel addressing the reader, fleshing out a theory introduced by our mynah bird, the page before.

“The real character of the story is a young woman,” explains the narrator on the facing page, “Haeckel is just a device.” And with that, the story turns back to Mercet, the aforementioned woman–a distant relative, it seems, of Haeckel himself. The layers of storytelling swirl throughout Ochre Ellipse, and by the close of this chapter, we’ve got no better of concept of where we stand with respect to the story than we did when it began. Coherence, it seems, is one of the casualties of maintaining so tenuous a focus of linear narrative. It also suffers a bit at the hands of Madden-Connor’s eagerness to flesh out so many ideas in so small a space.

Fortunately, in the case of Ochre Ellipse, it’s a minor hurdle to overcome. The book is the work of a young artist who is clearly having fun with every aspect of the medium, and the result is a mini-comic busting at the seams with fascinating ideas. Hopefully future installments will help see them through.

–Brian Heater