Lunch Break is a short round-up of favorite webcomics appearing here each weekday at noon. Here’s something for you to enjoy over your lunch break or whenever. The premise is simple: It’s another day on the internet. Here’s a new or forgotten comic that seems interesting.

We’d love to have you guest edit Lunch Break! Check out the Contribute page for more information.

1. Important Life Lesson from “xkcd” by Randall Munroe // date unknown
2. Top Shelf Kids Club 2011 preview by various // 2011
3. lament from “Bunny” by Huw Davies // February 22, 2011
4. Recommendations? from “Indexed” by Jessica Hagy // October 26, 2007
5. Ah Seen by Derik A. Badman // April 2011

– Sarah Morean

hey, bartender! with Brett Warnock from Sarah Morean on Vimeo.

Every story has its backstory, so they say. Take Lana Turner, who was just sipping a Coke before becoming a star. Or Abraham Lincoln, the simple rail splitter who grew to save the union. Why, even Brett Warnock was just a humble bartender before becoming an important comics publisher.

Warnock was mixing drinks for 12 years before Top Shelf took off, and it’s heartening to see that he hasn’t forgot his roots. His annual stint as bartender for the Isotope Award Ceremony is lucky indeed for the people who go, since it seems he hasn’t lost his touch. I’ll vouch for the margarita in this video — it was good.

Because we at the Cross Hatch want you to have an excellent liquor-filled weekend, here are a few variations on the trusty margarita from Warnock himself. Enjoy!

Margarita. (As per the video.)

• Salt rim of glass. Top with ice.
• In separate glass, add:
  • 1.5 oz tequila (i suggest Sauza Hornitos for mixing)
  • .5 oz triple sec
  • 1 oz. pure lime juice
  • splash of o.j.
  • 1 teaspoon superfine (bakers) sugar
• Shake vigorously in a cocktail shaker, pour, enjoy.

Margarita. (At home.)

• Same as above, but replace ingredients as follows:
• One half a ripe orange in place of o.j.
• One whole lime, cut in half, in place of lime juice
• Place ingredients in a mixing can and muddle before shaking

A toast!  To your health.

- 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

The Nobody
By Jeff Lemire
Vertigo

There are only five stories in the world—or maybe six or seven. The number varies slightly between tellings, sure, but the adage remains more or less the same. When boiled down to their purest essence, mankind has, in a sense, been reliving the same basic conceits since the dawn of storytelling. The moral, of course, is that the skill ultimately lies not in the story itself so much as the way it’s told. It’s one of the first lessons a low-level instructor will impart on you toward the beginning of nearly any creative writing course.

The concept is embraced to its fullest when artists opt to eschew the illusion of fresh storytelling in favor of an open retelling of some much-loved piece of art. Upon wrapping up his oft-lauded Essex County trilogy for Top Shelf, that’s precisely where Jeff Lemire went, choosing as his jumping off point H.G. Wells’s beloved science fiction allegory, The Invisible Man.

In adapting (or perhaps more appropriately, reimagining) the story, Lemire embraced yet another bit of creative writing 101: write what you know. For a backdrop, the artist provides us with Large Mouth, a small, rural town though ought prove rather familiar to those acquainted with the streets and farms of Essex County.

In spinning his tale of invisibility, Lemire tackles small town living with a certain sense of irony, when Griffen (a name borrowed directly from the Wells story), recently transformed and wrapped in those iconic bandages, holes up in a hotel in Large Mouth in an attempt to embrace a form of invisibility not granted by his experiments. Naturally, the specter of a bandaged man wandering the streets of a tightly-knit small town community awakens in its residents something quite the opposite, with the freakish stranger becoming an almost instantaneous lightning road for its paranoia and prejudices.  The ultimate irony, of course, the ease with which our invisible protagonist could slip by, undetected in any setting, should he simply unravel the bandages around his face.

There’s an awful lot of subtext crammed into these 144 pages, which, like Griffen himself, seesaw between being overly subtle and potentially overbearing, but Lemire does often gracefully skirt the line, when flash-backs to a time before the accident intersect with reality, and his shaky lines take over the story, as when the protagonist leaps into an icy lake to save a drowning love and slowly unravels into nothingness in its rippling depths.

At times, however, Lemire seems almost too pre-occupied with exploring large scale themes, sometimes at the expense of the story itself. As such, the book will likely prove frustrating for those expecting more adventure from a Vertigo book starring the invisible man. More often than not, the book feels like addendum to Essex County, a subtle, if slow moving work that’s more about people than events.

After the epic sweep of Essex County’s combined 500-plus pages, The Nobody also feels a bit slight, a simultaneous palate-cleansing stab at genre work and perhaps an attempt to close the door on a book that has almost certainly consumed a good portion of its author’s life. It’s not a bad book by any means, of course, but it’s certainly one struggling to come to grips with exactly  what it wants to be.

In that sense, The Nobody feels like a transitional piece as Lemire gathers the pieces for his next major work.

–Brian Heater

Nine Ways to Disappear
By Lilli Carre
Little Otsu

Given a little more time, one suspects that Lilli Carre could conjure up a lot more than nine. There are plenty of ways to disappear, and perhaps even more justifications for wanting to do so. It’s a good number though—certainly enough to fill up this beefy little teal volume. And besides, a nice, neat, round number like 10 wouldn’t suit an author so prone to open-ended tales as Carre.

Nine Ways to Disappear is a quiet book of single paneled pages based largely around narration, pieces mostly spun with fairy tale omniscience, a storytelling method well-suited to the magical realism that unfolds in nearly every piece. Mermaids populate these pages as do perpetually shrinking men and living skeletons. But Carre doesn’t embrace the fantastic for its own sake.

The unreal, rather is a means of escape—from reality, from society, from relationships, from ourselves. And true to her title, each piece explores a different means of doing so, some intentional, some accidental, and some—as in the case of a sewing needle that slips silently through a lonely drainpipe—seemingly indifferent to causation.

In that sense, these short stories feel like a logical extension to the wanderlust that persisted in the book’s successor, The Lagoon. But where that book explored Carre’s passion for the aural, Nine Ways to Disappear has more invested in the visual—particularly the artist’s love for old-fashion animation. At moments these stories feel more like the contents of flipbook than a comic.

But as a multimedia artist, Carre is keenly aware that the key moments of a story aren’t always in what you opt to put on paper. In both traditional animation and short fiction, tales unfold by the ways in which our minds connect the images and words and fill in the spaces between. As with The Lagoon, Carre is never one for a convenient ending, and even those tales that take the longest to unfold, such as the multi-layered “The Pearl,” the author never hands us a satisfactory resolution.

After all, even those in life who manage to disappear are never able to do so completely. There’s plenty more to see on the other side of a storm drain.

–Brian Heater

St. Louis Park, MN — the childhood home of the Coen Brothers, Al Franken, and the illustrious Kevin Cannon.  Science has yet to conclude, but I suspect, that something in the water accounts for this rash of entertainment success stories.

Currently, Cannon co-runs a cartooning and illustration studio called Big Time Attic with his best pal and non-relative Zander Cannon.  BTA started in 2004 and was originally a 3-man show also featuring Shad Petosky.  BTA has since branched into two studios, BTA and PUNY Entertainment which is the go-to animation studio for shows like Nickelodeon’s “Yo Gabba Gabba!”

Recently, BTA churned out the highly acclaimed educational graphic novel The Stuff of Life: A Graphic Guide to Genetics and DNA.  The book was featured on NPR’s “Science Friday,” a program with which I’m sure you nerds are familiar.

Cannon’s first solo book, the Arctic adventure Far Arden, will be released by Top Shelf this May.  The book is something of a triple-threat, having previously been serialed online as a webcomic (which you can still read), a self-published 100-copy offset print job (which sold out instantly), and a properly-distributed professionally-promoted graphic novel (which you should totally buy).  It topped my list of favorite mini-comics released in 2008, and I suspect it will top more best of lists for 2009 as a Top Shelf graphic novel.  It’s a real ripping yarn.

Cannon’s clear thirst for adventure comes out again in this guest strip, which you can read just below the Cutty Sark — I mean — cut.

- Sarah Morean

There’s a little bit of the future and the past in this quick final installment of our interview with The Lagoon author. We discuss the ways in which Lilli Caree’s fascination with sound has affected her comics, the power of a resolution-free ending, and why Hans Christian Andersen’s short story about a sad little Christmas tree is good fodder for a comic.

[Part One][Part Two]
Beyond the clear role that it played in The Lagoon, do you feel that your interest in sound has played affected your comics work?

I guess I’ve never thought of it as such. I don’t really see a connection between my initial interest in that and The Lagoon, but I guess it does create an environment, and it’s an interesting thing to play with, both in sound mixing and visually.

I brought The Lagoon to a panel I was on and found that people tended to interpret it in very different ways. That seems to keep with the thematic openness of Woodsman Pete. How important is the general lack of resolution to your books?

It definitely doesn’t offer that kind of ‘aha!’ ending, which a lot of people look for in a book—and I look for, sometimes. But I guess that’s just not the kind of book it is. I’m not interested in giving it a clear resolution like that. I was thinking of it more as a poem. I don’t want people to walk away with the same interpretation of it. I want people to have different readings on the whole thing.

What drew you to the Hans Christian Andersen story that you’re working on?

That was asked of me. I got to choose from several stories and I chose that one. But I love that story. It’s just so ridiculously dismal. I was kind of surprised that that was an option, and I leapt for it. it’s really interesting—I’ve never illustrated another person’s story, let alone a genius like Hans Christian Andersen. So well see.

What’s the project?

I don’t know much about publishing or what’s okay to talk about yet.

What drew you to the most dismal option available?

I wasn’t drawn to it because it was so bad. I just love that story and was surprised that they included it. in essence, this little tree is just waiting to be taken in. and then he does get cut down and taken into the home for Christmas, and he’s loving every minute of it. he overhears the Humpty Dumpty story and gets put in the attic and tells all of the mice the Humpty Dumpty story over and over again. They get kind of sick of it, and he’s just waiting to get dressed up for Christmas again. And they finally come up, and he gets excited to go down, but they just take him down to the alley and cut him up. The end! Although much more eloquently told.  I was also living in the moment. I don’t know why I got so excited about it…

–Brian Heater

For a book so invested in the poetry of sound, The Lagoon seems somehow quiet. Siren songs and metronomes and the whooshing of wind fill the its pages, but the book’s important moments, more often than not, seem to exist in the spaces in between, those quiet panels when its cacophonies have been temporarily extinguished.

It’s fitting then, in a sense, that when I first approach the book’s author, Lilli Carre, about doing an interview, she was a bit hesitant. She soon admitted that she had never actually done one via phone, and while I finally convinced her to give it a shot, I largely expected that, like The Lagoon, Carre would keep many of her answers to herself.

As it turns out, however, for all of her fears of coming across as muddled, Carre had plenty to say with regards to her methods and works, from The Lagoon to its predecessor Woodsman Pete, to the more sporadic work she’s done in the field of animation.

Are you on a regular 9 to 5 work schedule?

No. I have a really weird, open schedule.

What do you tend to do during the day?

These days I’m kind of indulging a bit. I’m working on my own stuff at the moment. I work two to three days at a movie rental place here as a clerk. And the rest of the time I work on illustration, comics, and that sort of thing. But I might have to switch to a more regular schedule soon.

Part of me misses working retail. Do you enjoy that process at all, or is it more just something that you have to do for money?

Well, I do enjoy it. for one because I just enjoy weird movies and I love being around creepy customers. It’s a social environment to counter all of the time spent alone, staring at paper. I think it actually keeps me kind of sane. I think I need a kind of structure like that, outside the realm of the things I make myself do for myself. It’s necessary for me, I think.

Do you make a mental catalog of the sort of weirdos who come through the door?

Well, maybe that’s too harsh to call them all “weirdos.” There are random people who do pop in and out, and I do think that movies draw a kind of interesting crowd, but I wouldn’t say I catalog it too much. I just enjoy it.

Was this ability to work two or three days a week afforded to you by having had back to back books out on Fantagraphics and Top Shelf?

Uh, no. That really has nothing to do with it. It’s really most the random illustration jobs that I get. And it’s just kind of living cheaply in general. It is kind of an indulgence to not work a 9 to 5 job. Which, I might do that again, sometime soon. I need to finish some things I’m working on now. I think I kind of like that, too, on occasion, so there isn’t so much pressure on working on stuff independently, in terms of making money and lifestyle. I think that just to relieve that pressure would be nice.

What percentage of the stuff that you work on during the day is illustration and what percent is comics?

It really depends on if I have work lined up or not. If I’m not getting any illustration work, then I’ll just work on comics for the whole day.

Do you always have a comics project waiting, if you don’t have other work lined up?

Yeah, kind of. I don’t know how that worked out, but yeah. There’s always some sort of long-term project boiling up. I’m really excited now that I’m in the Mome anthology, because then it’s a sort of a constant venue that I have for my work. So it’s exciting for me to now think about that.

Is that the deal with Mome? Whenever you have new stuff it will appear in the new issue?

I believe so. I’m actually not totally sure because I’m going to be in the next one for the first time. My understanding of it is that, once you’re in it, you’re allowed to contribute to each issue, quarterly. I’m not sure if they accept everything or everything or how that works. But, regardless of that, it’s just sort of a great motivation to make more short stories, basically.

So your work for the new Mome is a one-off?

It was 32 pages—the story was actually for something else, actually, that then got cancelled. That was pretty heartbreaking, actually [laughs]. So I was just sitting on this full-color story and I didn’t really know how to put it out, and then it ended up that it could be included in Mome. That was really exciting to me.

Was The Lagoon your first long-form piece?

Um, well, I kind of think of Woodsman Pete as being one continuous story. I think of that as being my first long-form story, even though it’s sort of broken up into vignettes. I think the bits and pieces all connect in a way that sort of makes it all one piece. But I guess, yeah, more distinctly, as one united story, The Lagoon is the longest thing I’ve done and my first “official” long story.

Was Woodsman Pete broken up that way because it was issued as minis?

Yeah. I was submitting them to the school paper. And as I was thinking of it more as a book after putting out the second mini comic, I started thinking about them as a whole and including the Paul Bunyan character and tying the stories together.

So working on a long-form piece is really something you’ve been interested in for as long as you’ve been doing comics?

Yeah, it’s exciting. I still don’t know know how to do it well [laughs].

In the literary sense, The Lagoon reads like a short story. Do you think of it that way, at all?

Yeah, somewhere between a poem and a short story, I’d say. Certainly not like a novel. It’s weird comparing comics to books, in terms of novels and short stories, because what defines “short?” you can read a comic so quickly, and so much of The Lagoon is this sort of ambient feeling and sound. I don’t know if that makes it long or short or what. But the content is definitely that of a short story and it kind of resolves itself more as a poem.

The use of sound in the story was an interesting choice, particularly given that it was created using a silent medium. Is it hard to rely so heavily on sound in a comic book?

I wasn’t pulling my hair. It was fun. I liked playing around with it as a visual, throughout the story and trying to figure out ways to visualize it. I really wanted to create a certain sound, and I felt like sound was the way to do that.  I had to spell it out, but when you’re reading a book, you really hear it in your head. I really wanted to create that kind of space. I don’t know if it worked for other people, but when I read those sounds, with the pacing from panel to panel, I feel like it created a mood that I really wanted.

[Continued in Part Two]

–Brian Heater

In The Country Nurse, the final installment of Jeff Lemire’s Essex County trilogy, the artist is obsessed with images—the image of the open farmland of Essex County, the image of a crow flying in front of the moon, the image of a boy growing up and learning the truth about who he is. He uses these composite images to complete a larger picture, started in the first two books in the series, of Essex County, a fictionalized version of his hometown.

In a real sense, then, Essex County is the protagonist of the three books. Whereas so often in series based on locations—consider any TV show set in a particular locale, for starters—the plots of the characters’ lives become the focus of the story, here the reverse is true: The tales of these characters are woven into the larger fabric of the story of Essex County, and the stories are important not so much for what happens in them as for how they represent life in the county. The lives of the people in Essex County become emblematic of the place, rather than subsuming it with their own drama.

Thus Lemire tells about his characters and their pasts, but in a very unassuming, unhurried way. As we read, we do not feel like we are racing toward any plot conclusions; we are merely observing and taking in what is set before us. The book is a feat of controlled tone and atmosphere. Lemire sets a slow pace that in turn mimics the pace of life in Essex County, where little really “happens” from day to day.

Because the plot is not at the forefront of the novel, the art is extremely important; luckily, it doesn’t disappoint. Lemire’s black-and-white drawings are poignant and at times deeply personal. He often prefers that we get to know the characters by reading the expressions on their faces, and sometimes their thoughts, rather than relying on dialogue. In one especially well-done scene, for instance, when Lester, who we met as a younger boy in book one, finally finds out who his father is, Lemire skips the conversation between uncle Ken (who is raising Lester) and his nephew altogether. Instead, Ken tells Lester that “we need to talk,” and what follows is a silent two-page spread that beautifully renders the slight movements indicative of the conversation. Lemire even removes us from the room in which they are talking, placing us outside the window as spectators, along with a crow.

The wonderful thing about a passage like this is the balance that he strikes between story and form. We are engaged in what is happening—we have been waiting since book one for Ken to tell Lester about his father—but also how it is happening—the sparse, simple drawings that distill an emotionally charged conversation down to a handful of understated moments in time.

–Jillian Steinhauer

The Man Who Loved Breasts
By Robert Goodin
Top Shelf

It’s hard to be genuinely funny in the comics medium. It’s a truth that countless syndicated strips remind us of on a daily basis. In some ways a certain portion of their failure to amuse can be chalked up to the parameters within which they must operate in order to appease the manner of mainstream audience that comes with widespread syndication.

While a fair argument can be made for the skill of a true comedian’s ability to embrace such constraints, underground cartoonist have tapped into one key truth about humor: sick shit is funny. The perverse, the unspeakable, the social unacceptable—it worked for Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor, and Bill Hicks, and thanks in no small part to the immediacy of visual stimuli, it’s worked for cartoonists from R. Crumb to Ivan Brunetti.

Let’s not, however, overestimate the importance of the visual in the equation. While plenty of artists know their way around a nice piece of graphically suggestive imagery, that skill alone does not a funny cartoonist make. As lowbrow as the work of, say, Kaz or Johnny Ryan can appear, there’s an oft unappreciated level of craftsmanship required in the execution of a truly laugh-out-loud piece of sequential art.
It is, perhaps, overstating matters to lump The Man Who Loved Breasts in with, say, Comic Book Holocaust, however. Robert Goodin’s work is a touch more subtle, and, at least in the case of the book’s eponymous strip, the writer seems as interested in telling a story as devising a well-delivered joke. “The Man Who Loved Breasts” proves a surprisingly touching little story. Less fueled by sexual obsession than the title—and cover—might lead one to suspect, the titular man begins the story in a dead-end job typing promotional news letters for a vacuum and sewing company aimed at “housewives out in the suburbs.”

While the sexual overtones are certainly impossible to ignore, it’s the man’s genuine aesthetic affection for breasts combined with a distaste for his mundane employer that lead him to quit his job, experiment with alcoholism, and ultimately open up his own brassiere manufacturing company—all while pressing forth through a number of graphic montages that gleefully reestablish his—and, arguably, Goodin’s—appreciation for the aforementioned body part. The artist also readily embraces the time period in which the story is set, bringing into play the stodgy uniformity of the 50s and the liberating protests of the 60s, ultimately transcending the prurient nature of the story’s title.

The following strip, “George Olavatia: Amputee Fetishist” is a far more one note piece than its predecessor. Fortunately, it’s a funny one. It’s also a much more linear approach to comedic payoff, working steadily toward a punchline.  Goodin is far less focused on any semblance of storytelling with “George Olavatia,” which is no doubt why the story was relegated to second string. Still, the strip is every bit as amusing as its decidedly frank title would lead one to believe.

The third and final strip, “A 21st Century Cartoonist in King Arthur’s Court” is the weakest of the trio. The punchline is amusing once again, but it lacks the stamina of “George Olavatia” and the heart of “The Man.” It does, however, provide glimpse into the diversity of Goodin’s pen, displaying a more cartoony take on his drawing style than its predecessors.

A rare one-shot from Top Shelf, The Man Who Loved Breasts is a nice introduction into Goodin’s work for a larger audience. It’s funny, well-drawn, and, at its best, gracefully balances the risqué with the substantive.

–Brian Heater