Powr Mastrs Vol 2
By CF
Picturebox

“The answers I’m searching for, I find behind the Brown Door,” Buell Kazee says and descends into the cellar of the Plex Knowe Crypt. He inserts the key and opens the door. “Buell,” exclaims a blister-headed monster behind the brown door. One skeletal arm and one green tentacle emerge from the monster’s shrimp-shaped carapace.

“Viskoser Tod. Are you hungry?” Buell asks.

“Yesss . . . Hungry . . ,” hisses Viskoser Tod.

Buell explodes with laughter, “Ha, ha, ha!”

Holding the green tentacle in one hand, Buel laughs.

Answers?

Buell must have been asking a rather simple question, or maybe Viskoser Tod could destroy Mosfet? I wrestle with questions. The shiny blue first volume I hold in my hands. The great questions lead to greater awareness, and I have possession of Powr Mastrs Volume 2.

Reading through the book, I soon notice I have already reached page 100. There’s a bit more to come, but what happened? The events make sense in the same way a dream makes sense. It’s an internal logic. It’s strange, things happen in Vol. 2 but not in the conventional sense of one unfolding narrative idea. I like the open space, the clear line, the avoidance of rendering. There’s no crosshatching or filling in space with black. This creates a fluidity and fast pace to the art. It’s easy to look at and very readable.

Looking at the cover, there’s no visual cue that this is a “comic book”, no homage to any convention of traditional book design. Though the back cover has a picture: a kind of circus performer in frilled short shorts, elven boots, and a gloved hand holding a bifurcated whip. His expression made strange by facepaint on one side of his mouth. By page 100, I knew this character to be Ajax Lacewing, a homicidal maniac. He ejaculates as he pokes out the eyes of a giant. “Giants . . . rip off the head, the limbs pop off—works every time,” Ajax declares.

Powr Mastrs. The title itself is something to decipher. But let’s try: Power Masters. “Our plan to create a super warrior is on its way to completion once more,” says Cool George Herc. “Soon we will have Mosfet on his knees.” Now, I recognize the power struggle. It is a comic book. Enter the need for a character with something he desperately must obtain, the necessity of conflict. Sure, it’s a comic book trope, a narrative device, a man in a room must have something he wants, even if it’s just a glass of water. Most stories have a character or group of characters that have some identifiable purpose they struggle to achieve.

A difficulty with Powr Mastrs is evidenced in the number of characters, all quite unique. Subra Ptareo, Naphtha, Laz, Bui, Hondo, Ahphsia the Witch, Ajax Lacewing, Windlass Wendy Wheeta the Witch, Cool George Herc, Darman Orry, Lady Minirex, Pico Farad, Constable Liederkreis, Mechlin Men, Steven, Buell Kazee, Mosfet Warlock, Tetradyne Cola, Jim Bored, Hannah the Witch, Viskoser Tod, and the Sub-Men.

That’s an ambitious roster of characters. Impressive and inventive. This book is calling out its epic from the first pages. A new and strange world. It is populated by many unknown beings. The challenge presented to the average reader of Powr Mastrs is quite simply to discern where the narrative is going. The map of Known New China at the front of the book is evidence that we’re not on Earth; it doesn’t readily resemble a landmass. What we seem to be inhabiting: it’s two circles, Ice and White Block, connected by a land bridge in the shape of a perfect arc called Oxbow Bridge. This illustrates the story’s general ambiance of abstraction. The map does list the disparate location of events in the story and connects them in space.

The characters’ relationship one another coheres in the episode beginning on page 73, “Pico’s Cabinet.” Pico Farad offers the reader some explanation of what were dealing with in Plex Knowe Crypt, “A more or less comfortable prison, Plex Knowe Crypt’s resentful inhabitants represent some of Mosfet’s ill-fated schemes.” Buell Kazee is a super-warrior and guardian of Mosfet. Cool George Herc, a prisoner of the Crypt, enlisted Buell to overthrow Mosfet. And Mosfet? “He was, or is, so very strange, and so very unpredictable, and so old . . .” Naphtha informs us. And Naphtha? He is an elf, one of Mosfet’s only friends, and also close with Pico Farad. What are the nature of these relationships? Why does the assassin Ajax Lacewing give things to Pico Farad? Who are the ladies of Lace Temblor and why do they declare: “Hail, hail, the collapsing field . . . and hail to the true, intense guardians of the secret!?” Who are the guardians of the secret? It must be CF, the artist. CF must hold the secret. His subconscious is rife with mystery that unspools in his illustrious line.

CF’s short episodes are cruel and beautiful depictions that stand alone with strange resonance; the artist creates a shorthand link to the subconscious. This works well in the short form. Each episode is a problem-finding exercise, each goes deeper into the subconscious and requires the artist to solve the narrative impulse, to create meaning. Pico’s Cabinet is a where the pieces of the puzzle are stored. “What are they for?” Pico implores. “I just don’t know . . . but I store their charge. I have the will to try to understand them . . . But I guess it’s more like the will to know what I ams (sic), or what I’m here for . . .” Readers attracted to Powr Mastrs are likely comfortable with uncertainty, ambiguity, newness. It’s on the level of figuring out a puzzle.

Enter the necessity for Major Grubert. Moebius often drew pages straight into pen without any preliminary drawing or scripting. A pencil drawing is intimate; it is a first response to the creative impulse. It hasn’t been refined or worked into a technique designed for reproduction. It is unmediated. We see the mind at work. The artist finds the story by allowing a dialogue with the subconscious through an unfettered play of the imagination. The hermetic is self-contained; the Airtight Garage has it’s own reasoning accessed in the glimmerings of the subconscious.

“It’s nice at home,” Pico says, “because you can set things up the way that you want them. Outside . . . when you get stuck, it can be much harder to find an escape hatch.” Ultimately, the comic book itself is the escape. The imagination, the hermetic garage, the artist’s studio. That is the escape from the world. It’s where the power struggle has ended and everything is where you want it. The artwork is a gift to us from that place of power.

When I picked up Kramers Ergot #4 the thing was fairly dripping with hallucinogenic verve. I don’t care if the artists never touched a single psychotropic substance in their collective lives; the drugs aren’t what I was seeing, I was looking at the uninhibited imagination. I could take it all, but what most drew my attention were the pages of CF—Chris Forgues, originally from the Boston area. His credits include work with the Fort Thunder collective and Paper Rodeo. In the noise music scene, he records and releases music as Kites. It’s exciting to see the artist’s attention turned to the creation of Powr Mastrs. With the appearance of Volume 2 we receive the promise of more. The artwork develops; the color fairly drips; and the book does end in the tradition of an old serial: to be continued.

–Arthur Smid

It was standing room only on Sunday night—or kneeling, rather, as audience members contorted bodies around the projector’s beam cutting through the center of the room. The consensus, it seems, amongst nearly everyone packed into KGB Bar on Manhattan’s East 4th st. was that the bi-annual comics event had finally outgrown its old home amongst the strangely homey décor of Soviet-era Russian memorabilia lining the walls.

Over the years the event has become one of the best-loved in the New York indie comics scene, hosted by Tom Hart twice-yearly—on Easter Sunday and the Sunday following Thanksgiving, the latter of which happily boasts the tagline, ‘Come digest that tryptophan with comix!’

Despite said poultry-induced sluggishness, widespread jetlag, the stormy weather, and the innate desire to spend the bulk  of the weekend on the business end of a treadmill, the turnout seems to perpetual increase, year after year, thanks in no small part to the consistently stellar lineup of comics artists reading their work alongside panels projected large on a bedsheet pulled taut along the front wall of the bar.

This year Jonathan Ames and Dean Haspiel shared the headlining spot, the former reading from the duo’s recent Vertigo release, The Alcoholic. Also on board were fellow Act-I-Vater, Fishtown’s Kevin Colden; How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less author, Sarah Glidden; and Matthew Thurber, whose 1-800-Mice #1 debuted on Brooklyn’s Picturebox, last winter.

Colden stared the evening off with the first few pages of his recent IDW release, Fishtown. The book, which follows the based-on-real-events murder of a teenager in the Fishtown district of Philadelphia, highlighted the decided change in tone of this year’s selections, which were a touch more solemn than those of past events. All of the artists present, Colden included, however, made a point to bring a bit of levity to the otherwise serious nature of their works. Colden added sound effects to his piece, highlighting the already absurd nature of reading aloud from a comic book in front of a packed East Village bar.

Thurber was on second, with an innovative presentation that proved the surprise hit of the night. Armed with the one solidly comedic work on display, Thurber concocted a scrolling real of butcher paper to accompany the reading of 1-800-Mice. The artist directed the room’s attention to the rear window of the bar over which he had hung a large roll of paper. Panel by panel he unspooled it as he read from the work, crumpling the finished work in a large pile at the bottom, much to the audible chagrin of those empathetic audience members who could only imagine how much time the artist must have invested in the spool.

After a quick intermission Sarah Glidden read cheerfully from the opening of How to Understand Israel’s first issue. The portion focused on Glidden’s own idealistic optimism on the lead up to her Birthright Israel trip, following her journey to the airport where the narrator and her fellow travelers met with a fair amount of hassle at the hands of the security guards. At an appropriately climatic moment involving a piece of unaccompanied luggage, the slideshow app unexpectedly quit, revealing a large cartoon “Boom!” that Hart had chosen as his computer’s desktop for reasons unbeknownst to the rest of us.

Haspiel opted to stay at the bar as Ames took charge reading selections from The Alcoholic, the thinly-veiled semi-autobiographical book following the adventures of one “Jonathan A.” Having loosened up with the aid of a few vodkas, Ames launched into a few of the more comedic moments from the book, including a chance encounter with Monica Lewinsky, which, the author happily pointed out, was sufficiently meta, having taking place during a reading in the same bar in which we were all sitting.

Even Hart himself admitted begrudgingly that said bar was, perhaps, just not large enough to hold the event, should it continue to grow at the current rate. And while it would be a shame to have to leave the warm literati-friendly watering hole, the increasing popularity of the event is certainly an encouraging sign of things to come.

–Brian Heater

Where Demented Wented Book Release
Desert Island Comics, Brooklyn, NY 8/8/08

[Gary Panter, Bill Griffith]

[More photos available on our Flickr page.]

[More videos on our YouTube page.]

“This is the largest crowd that Rory’s ever had,” laughed Bill Griffith, only half-jokingly. Desert Island Comics was packed Friday night, in joint celebration of Fantagraphics’ upcoming Rory Hayes anthology, Where Demented Wented and a posthumous celebration of the artist’s 59th birthday. The owners Brooklyn-based shop had diligently swept all of the store’s waste-high shelves into the its remotest corner, but the space was still standing room-only, at best.

Griffith’s bafflement at the matter was palatable. After all, Hayes was never really recognized in his lifetime, whatever minor fame he achieved paling in comparison to habitually lauded peers like Robert Crumb and S. Clay Wilson. Posthumous fame hasn’t exactly been forthcoming, either. For all intents and purposes, the newly-issued Fantagraphics volume is the first widely available anthology of Hayes’s work.

[Bill Griffith, Geoffrey Hayes]

The attendance could no doubt–at least in part–be chalked up to the panel that had been culled together for the occasion, moderated by Picturebox founder and Demented co-editor, Dan Nadel, and featuring the aforementioned Griffith (he of Zippy fame); Hayes’s brother and fellow cartoonist, Geoffrey Hayes; and the inimitable Kim Deitch (who, was sadly absent from the proceedings, though the Gary Panter, who was present amongst the audience, was more than happy to fill in from the other side of the store’s impromptu table).

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lwb2PAoHOJg]

Geoffrey reminisced about brothers’ early years, as burgeoning comic artists inspired by the likes of Carl Barks. Griffith happily touched on nearly everything else, from early stories involving well known peers (and Hayes admirers) like Crumb, Deitch, and Spiegelman, to some his short-lived career as a burgeoning horror film director, to the artist’s later years scraping together a living working at a San Francisco-based comic shop while selling the occasional print to a philanthropic admirer—nearly every tale, however, was peppered with the inevitable reference to Hayes’s growing battle with drugs, which ultimately ended his life at age 34.

Most telling, however, amongst Griffith’s accounts, were the near constant references to Henri Rousseau, a fellow insider-outsider artist whose “primitive” art was lauded amongst contemporaries like Picasso, but largely ignored in his lifetime, in favor of his more famous peers.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJj0szq9mCo&feature=related]

Asked whether any contemporary artist claimed Hayes as an inspiration, Griffith couldn’t think of a single one. “But they will after this book comes out,” he added, optimistically. Surely there couldn’t have been a more appropriate forum for such a hopeful sentiment, inside a Williamsburg alternative comic shop, walls lined with a wide array of two-dimension figurines crafted by a large cross-section of up-and-coming artists for an event crated by Picturebox’s own Lauren Weinstein. A cursory glance around the shop revealed exactly where demented has gone.

–Brian Heater