Author: Andrew Wheeler

We all regret our twenties. Some of us regret how quickly we settled down and got boring, and some of us regret that we didn’t settle down and get boring, at all or quickly enough.

I’m one of the former; I think Julia Wertz is one of the latter. Museum of Mistakes is the big collection of the comics she made at the time, and somewhat afterward, about her not being boring.

(Well. not exactly: Wertz shows herself as a massive introvert and an alcoholic, who spent way too much time in a tiny apartment making comics and drinking. One might well think of that as being boring.)

These days, artistic development happens in public more often than not, and it was that way for Wertz: she started publishing comics about her early-twenties life in San Francisco as “The Fart Party” about a decade ago, turned some of those comics into self-published zines soon afterward, and then turned those into books. She had two collections of Fart Party — I reviewed the first one, more or less, for Comic Mix in 2008 — and then went to a bigger company for Drinking at the Movies , which was billed as a full-length memoir but was really another collection of somewhat linked stories, all about her life at the time. It could have been Fart Party 3, but it wasn’t. (Big companies are not likely to start off a brand-new relationship with a #3.)

The big-company thing didn’t entirely work out for Wertz: she was part of the land-rush for cartoonists (especially autobiographical, especially female) in the wake of Persepolis and some other big successes. And the thing about a publishing land-rush is that a lot of stuff — good, not-as-good, half-baked — is published by people who haven’t figured out yet how to replicate success, and are hoping they can hit the target enough times to work out a coherent plan. Wertz’s comics were real and raw and true, but they were pretty far from the things that were working really big in those days, so it’s not surprising that Drinking didn’t rocket her to fame and fortune.

(And, possibly as important, Wertz was really ambivalent about fame and fortune. Around the same time, there was nearly a TV show based on Fart Party, but, as she’s told the story afterward in her comics, she sabotaged it, partly on purpose and partly unconsciously.)

Since the world loves irony, her book after the big-company book was stronger and more of a clear step forward in telling longer, more unified stories — that was The Infinite Wait , which brings us up to as close to now as Wertz got in her career. She hasn’t published much in the past half-decade or so; she got into “urban exploration” and maybe just living her life for a while instead of turning it into comics immediately.)

So this book, from 2014, is still (I think) her most recent. It collects all of The Fart Party and The Fart Party 2, plus another book’s worth of other strips: a section of stuff that wasn’t Fart Party 3 because she did Drinking instead, some pre-Fart Party work, sketches, zine work, and other things.

This is the definitive early Wertz: the snotty slacker who had a series of lousy food-service jobs, had her boyfriend move cross-country and then break up with her, and who herself moved from San Francisco to Brooklyn. She loved cheese and wine, she took as little shit as she possibly could, she swore a lot, and she had a weird childhood.

She’s probably still some of those things, or is the person formed by being those things in her twenties. Any book, especially a memoir, is a snapshot of who that person was at the time, and Wertz was very good at snapshots, with her deliberately crude art and sarcastic dialogue. No one wants the burden of being the voice of a generation, but Wertz did speak for a lot of millennials in the late Bush II years– grumpy, disgruntled, stuck in a crapsack world built by other people, looking for their own moments of happiness and fulfillment. She was good at it by not trying to do anything like that: she just told stories of her own life, which was close enough to a million other lives to catch fire. It was a Fart Party, and we won’t see it’s like again.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

This book has more panels introducing its characters than any comic I’ve ever seen in my life. I know it was originally published as twelve individual issues of the Jack Staff comic, but it’s much more common than that — so often that I started to think this had been serialized somewhere, no more than five pages at a time, for an audience with short-term memory loss.

It’s clearly on purpose, even if I’m not sure why creator Paul Grist is doing it. Is it some meta-commentary on superhero comics? A sly jab at the big comics universe-building instinct, so that every important character gets a hook and a logo, ready to spin off into his own book at the drop of a hat?

In any case, that’s how Jack Staff, Vol. 1: Everything Used to Be Black and White goes — every time the plot shifts to Jack, or to Becky Burdock, {Spoiler} Reporter, or to Tom Tom the Robot Man, or to The Spider, or to Bramble & Sons, Vampire Hunters, or to Detective Inspector Maveryk, old-fashioned copper, there’s a logo-like treatment of their names splashed on the page, and usually some purple prose that almost but not quite tells the true believers to face front.

I suspect that Grist does not take his superhero comics entirely seriously, but that’s fine: I haven’t been able to do that for at least two decades now myself. And Jack Staff comes across as a book in which the creator is having an immense amount of fun, and is choosing the plot elements that make him cackle in delight as he draws them. That may make for a certain amount of whiplash, as he jumps from plot thread to plot thread every couple of pages, but it’s all clear, and the reader certainly has no trouble remembering who any of the characters are.

In any case: this is a British superhero comic, so it’s required by law to be somewhat self-effacing and to subvert expectations of the genre at least once per twenty-four pages. Grist is entirely happy to do that, but his subversion is of an older school than Moore or Morrison: he’s someone who seems to doubt, down deep, that dressing up in silly costumes and punching people is really a good solution to serious problems. That is entirely true, but it can be a fatal attitude for superhero comics unless it’s coupled with a light touch.

Grist does also have a light touch, so we’re good there.

Jack himself is a mildly brick-like superguy, dressed in his nation’s flag and first encountered during WW II doing his bit to defend democracy and battle the evil Hun. He’s clearly tough to some level, but he can’t fly or do any of that obvious super-stuff, and he needs a big stick to hit people adequately. On the other hand, he does seem to be much, much older than he has any right to be, and still looking mid-thirties in these stories from the late ’90s. There are more serious supernatural elements — I mentioned vampire hunters above, and they do have vampires to hunt — and one villain we see has definite weather-control powers. So this is a real superhero universe, even if we’re just seeing a quirky British corner of it.

I originally read Grist’s crime comic Kane in the ’90s — it looks like I kept up with it almost to the end, missing the last collection — and bought this 2004 collection about four years ago with a thought of maybe getting into his other big self-published series. There are three more Jack Staff collections, I see, though this series also seems to be definitively over. I might keep going, if I can find the books: this are fun adventure comics that don’t take themselves too seriously, and Grist’s inky art and smash-cut plotting make his pages lively and zippy.

If you, too, are willing to accept that superheroes are inherently goofy, you’ll probably enjoy it as well.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

For those of you scoring at home, this is the major Brandon Graham comic that does not include a random hardcore sex scene thrown into the middle (The one that does is Multiple Warheads . Graham toiled in the sex-comics vineyards for several years, and one sex-comic idea blossomed or transformed into an idea that could be a comic about other things than sex.)

This is the major Brandon Graham comic that features a cat with drug-induced superpowers, though. So if that’s the one you wanted: here you go.

(There’s also Prophet, but I think he just wrote that and doesn’t own it, either. I’m enough of a purist to have a preference for the comics that someone owns and does all the work on.)

As I understand it, King City is a slightly earlier work than Multiple Warheads, though I think the publication history of both stories is a bit mixed and mingled. (And Prophet is later than both of them. Maybe still going on now, for all I know!) In any case, it was eventually twelve issues of comics, in two big clumps, from first Tokyopop and then Image. This big collection of the whole shebang came out in 2012 and says it was co-published by the two companies. (My guess is that Image did all of the work and just cut Tokyopop a check based on whatever they owned/controlled, but I am a noted cynic.)

King City is a young man’s comic, about a young man: Joe, the Cat Master who would have been the title character if Tokyopop hadn’t balked at Cat Master for a title. He’s back in King City after a few years away, learning the secrets of Cat Mastery somewhere in California and getting his weapon/partner Earthling along the way. In case you’re wondering, the cat doesn’t talk, or do anything particularly un-catlike except when Joe injects him with a syringe to unlock weird powers. Earthling is pretty much here to be Joe’s random superpower, and to give Graham an excuse to draw a bucket full of cat regularly.

Joe meets back up with his old friend Pete, who doesn’t have any particular super-stuff, but does strange odd jobs for one of the local gangs. King City is deeply weird, in a manga-meets-indy-comics way, so the gangs are inscrutable and hermetic and don’t seem to spend any time doing anything we’d normally think of as criminal activity — but they are dangerous, and have their own weird powers and abilities. There’s also Joe’s old girlfriend Anna, who he’s still pining for, but she’s now with Max, a shell-shocked survivor of the zombie war in Korea who is now addicted to the drug chalk (which turns its users, eventually, into chalk).

Those are the characters, more or less. There’s also Beebay, the mysterious woman who hires Joe for her gang, Pete’s nasty employers and the water-breathing nameless alien girl they hire him to transport (until he falls for her and pulls a double-cross), a few other cat masters who show up for the big showdown, and a gigantic Lovecraftian-cum-Akira-ball-of-flesh that must be stopped in the finale.

Well, stopped by someone. Not necessarily our heroes. It’s not that kind of story.

Graham bounces from just-slightly-satirical spy-craft to kitchen-sink drama to goofball pun-based comedy, often the the course of a single panel. What ties it all together is this overstuffed neo-future city, where everything is unreal enough for anything to be possible. It’s not a heavily plotted comic — things happen, and they happen in a logical sequence, but it doesn’t build up to anything, and Graham wants to subvert expectations rather than encourage them. His art is similar bouncy: here a little manga-inspired, especially in the buildings, here a little indy-goofball, here recovering sex-comics artist.

So King City feels a lot like another slacker comic: the characters aren’t exactly slackers themselves, but it has that laid-back vibe, as if nothing can get too bad, as long as you’ve got your cat with you. And that’s all right, man.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

I am so glad middle school is far behind me. I even gladder my two sons are past those years as well, and that I don’t expect to have any other kids to shepherd through those years. And I don’t think it’s purely Schadenfreude when I read a story about middle-schoolers — but there might be an element of “thank ghod that’s long over.”

Brave is a middle-school story — about and mostly for middle-schoolers, though pitched so even adults (even us poor benighted adults) can enjoy it. It’s from Svetlana Chmakova, and is set in the same school as her previous graphic novel Awkward . It struck me as stronger and more emotionally resonant than Awkward was, but maybe that’s just me: I was a large, bullied middle-school boy who spent his time thinking about other things, so Jensen Graham’s story strikes a chord and reminds me of things I’d rather not remember.

(And I still think this school’s mania about clubs is a lot more from the Japanese manga school-story tradition — and maybe from actual Japanese school life, as far as I know — than it is from the way kids operate in the US today. But maybe there are a lot of super-club-centric middle schools out there that I’m not aware of?)

Jensen is the fictional version of that kid: too big, too distracted, too uninterested in what most kids care about, too easy to pick on. (A little more so than the real version of that kid, and a bit cartoony to make it funny as well as sad.) You might have been that kid at ten or twelve — I was, pretty much.

He doesn’t have any real friends as the book opens, but doesn’t really realize it — he’s part of the art club, and thinks of those kids as his friends even though they make fun of him and don’t include him in their activities. But, again, he’s distracted and unconnected, so he doesn’t notice that a lot of the time. Maybe it’s just him, maybe it’s a deeply-buried coping mechanism: it’s harder for people to hurt you if you don’t notice they’re trying to hurt you.

Jensen thinks of his school life as a video game — get through the level, avoid the monsters, and reach the treasure at the end (art club). But the monsters keep getting tougher, and he’s fallen behind in math, so he needs to get tutoring…in a group with one of his main bullies. (Unlike a lot of popular fiction, Chmakova doesn’t present Jensen’s school as having one big bully who eternally schemes to make his life hell — instead, like the real world, he has a lot of people who make fun of him a little and a few who get more nasty joy out of tormenting him whenever they have a chance. Nobody’s obsessed with Jensen; he’s just a convenient target.)

But, at the same time, he may be finding some people who could be real friends — or, at least, friendly. Like the taciturn athlete he’s been partnered with on a project in English. Or the students on the newspaper, who may be interested in Jensen as a subject for their bullying study, but also think of him as a real person and try to help him. As someone who was a geeky boy — and now has a couple of geeky sons his own — I wish that he found people who share some of his real interests, but he’s at least on the right path.

Brave is a more realistic bullying story than most: there’s no horribly nasty kid who can be easily defeated in the end, and the adult leadership of the school is often capricious and wrong from the kids’ point of view. But it shows people — kids, in particular — seeing things that are wrong and working together to make them better. Jensen’s new newspaper friends call out bad actors and publicize explanations of bad behavior, giving the less-engaged mass of kids tools to make their own lives better and to treat each other more fairly. It’s not just a good book on its own, but one that can do good in the world, if put in the hands of the right kids — I hope it will be.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Jennifer Hayden is a middle-aged New Jerseyan, telling stories here about her growing kids and family life — so why did it take me so long to get to a 2011 book so close to my own life and experience? (I’m generally all over that stuff: don’t we all love to be validated by art that reflects the way we see the world?)

Well, I did see her big graphic novel The Story of My Tits (spoiler alert: the story is cancer) a few years back, and I’ve had Underwire on my shelf at least since then. This book-a-day run gave me a good excuse to pull it down, and I realized this was a compilation — it collects a strip she did for Dean Haspiel’s ACT-I-VATE collective, strips done around the same time she was working on the big book.

So this book has thirty pieces — a few of them are full-page illustrations (generally of what I’d call “goddessy stuff,” which may be a consumer warning for some), but most are comics. The stories are mostly two or three pages long — a vignette or moment of her life, or a whimsical dream — but there’s also a ten-pager, “Girls’ Club,” about a Christmas party and a night staying at the title club, where her grandmother made posters years ago.

Each story is a little slice of life — Hayden focuses on domesticity, so it’s about moments with her two teen kids and husband, rather than work or the wider world. These are about what it’s like to be Jennifer Hayden, in the years 2008-2010, with a daughter who got amazingly sophisticated overnight and a son who’s ready to go off on his own. A few are flights of fancy, but still rooted in that normal life. Not big things, no. But the stuff that good lives, and good people, are made of.

Hayden has a heavily-detailed, ornate style with a cartoony edge — not a million miles away from Lynda Barry, but entirely its own thing. This is a small, quirky book of small, quirky stories — but all lives are small and quirky when you look at them close up. It’s just that most of us aren’t as good at Hayden at really looking at them.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

I have a hard time telling if I’m supposed to take this seriously. I mean, the volume subtitle is “Fourgy,” and there’s a food truck, apparently a franchised operation, called “Wide Wiener,” with a humorously double-entendre theme song. But it also has a melodramatic comic-book plot, and a more kitchen-sinkly dramatic human story.

So I suspect it’s meant to be just barely serious enough, so that creators Matt Fraction and Chip Zdarsky can continue to make silly sex jokes to their hearts’ content but that the whole thing doesn’t descend into farce. And I guess that’s OK with me: after all, this is the story of two young lovers who discover they can stop time when they orgasm.

(That is a sillier superpower than, say, Spider-Man’s, but of more immediate use to most people’s lives. And not all that much sillier, to be honest.)

So, here we are with the fourth collection of Sex Criminals, which is indeed subtitled Fourgy . We got here, in case you’re unfamiliar and need to brush up, from the unnamed first volume and Two Worlds, One Cop and Three the Hard Way .

Sex Criminals is, at this point, already at least halfway to being a Marvel Max comic — the sex is mostly tasteful and 90% hetero, with no on-panel insertions, and the cast is roughly half superheroes. Just classify orgasm-based metahuman abilities as a mutant power and Bamf! you’re there. Oh, there aren’t any big fight scenes yet, but just wait. Everything in mainstream comics eventually becomes about superheroes, no matter how hard it fights the pull.

Ostensibly, this is the story of Suzie and Jon’s relationship — which goes through some serious ups and downs this time out — but we’re really here because we want to see them finally have it out with Kegelface’s Sex Cops. (Note: her name is not Kegelface and her guys are not actually sex cops.) Sadly, that doesn’t actually happen here — as I said above, the fight scene is still on the way. Given what Sex Criminals is about, it might be more of a fuck scene anyway.

This is goofy and it can be hard to take seriously, even when it wants you to. It’s definitely fun, and it’s a different take on wild talents, I’ll say that much — not quite as different as it could have been, but I already made the superhero/black-hole comparison. If you’ve avoided it so far, I can say that it’s still weird and quirky, and that it is not trying to titillate you. And it is about Sex Criminals, and they are interesting people, with more characterization than usual for either a comic book about sex or one about strange powers.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

“Aw, this is a sequel to somethin’!”
 – Crow T. Robot

I never read Kings in Disguise. On the Ropes is a sequel to Kings in Disguise. So anyone who is looking for a comparison to Kings in Disguise will be disappointed. Anyone wondering how many consecutive sentences I cram Kings in Disguise into, though, may be intrigued.

Kings in Disguise was a comics series by James Vance and Dan E. Burr, published by Kitchen Sink Press over several years in the mid-’80s and eventually collected into book form. Telling the story of plucky Depression orphan Fred Block, Kings in Disguise was critically lauded, winning both the Eisner and Harvey awards. Luckily, we’re not here to talk about Kings in Disguise. Because, as I said, I never read Kings in Disguise.

To repeat: On the Ropes is a sequel to Kings in Disguise, set about five years later. Since — and this will, I hope, be the last time I mention this — I never read Kings in Disguise, I’m not entirely certain which flashbacks in On the Ropes are to the earlier story and which are to things that happened after that story ended. I think Fred lost a leg in a freight-car-hopping accident after Kings in Disguise, but I could be wrong. Anyway, he’s now 17, and it’s 1937, and he’s working as the assistant to an escape artist in a WPA circus traveling the small cities of Illinois. [1]

Fred is also a labor organizer, or at least associated with a group of organizers trying to get together a major strike against steel mills across the Rust Belt (then still moderately shiny, at least for the bosses). In particular, he has a small but vital role in that organizing effort, which will cause him danger and distress.

His boss is Gordon Corey, who I’m afraid is that semi-cliche, the escape artist who yearns to die. Gordon also has secrets in his past, which would-be novelist Fred will ferret out as he tries to ingratiate himself with a female stringer who he thinks can help him with his writing and maybe make some introductions to help him get published.

The narrative also follows, in parallel, two very nasty men — one smaller, smarter, and fond of a knife, the other big and strong but not quite as stupid as you’d expect — who are employed by the usual shadowy rich people to do some union-busting, and who rack up a serious body count along the way. This element feels pretty melodramatic; they kill more people than is plausible for traveling freelancers — they need to be more solidly plugged into a specific power structure to have the cover-ups of multiple murders in multiple places be reasonable, even in a deeply corrupt time and place.

Again, I didn’t read Kings in Disguise; I can’t compare the two. This is a solidly lefty book about labor agitation in hard times, with a melodramatic plot and a certain stretching for meaning, which I didn’t find entirely convincing. My understanding is that it did not take twenty-five years to create — Kings in Disguise was published as a complete work in 1988 and On the Ropes came out as an original graphic novel in 2013 — but Burr’s art sometimes varies from page to page, making me wonder how long it did take. (He also sometimes draws different characters in slightly different styles in the same panel, which is mildly surprising — I couldn’t figure out if there was a specific artistic purpose there.)

On the Ropes is a solid, historically grounded graphic novel, shining a light on a piece of history a lot of people have forgotten now. (A lot of working people in this country, in particular, have forgotten how much blood people like them shed to get unions, as they run headlong away from them into the cold embrace of corporate generosity.) I don’t think it’s a masterpiece, but it’s worth reading for people interested in the period, the creators, or the subject. And, of course, for anyone looking for comics about actual people in real-world situations, of which there are always fewer than there should be.

[1] Note that this is the first sentence in this review not to mention Kings in Disguise. I could have kept it up, if I wanted. I’m not proud. Or tired.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

The hardest thing, for me, is to write on a book about normal people’s normal lives — without the genre trappings of excitement and violence, without the framework of some standard plot, without being able to do the Hollywood high concept thing of matching a new work with X and Y from the past. When that book is in comics form, and a lot of the heavy lifting of emotion and connection and scene-setting and time passing is done through art, it’s even harder: I’m not artistically trained, and I don’t have a strong vocabulary to talk about those elements.

So, um, Equinoxes is a big, stunning book, sprawling across a whole year and a large chunk of France, with a large cast, not all of whose names we learn. It comes from Cyril Pedrosa, who in that European-comics style is usually credited with just his last name, and whose work I haven’t seen since the heartbreakingly wonderful Three Shadows in 2008.

Pedrosa organizes his book around the four seasons, starting in autumn — and, yes, he is eliding solstices into equinoxes to make the structure work, but let’s not be too much astronomical sticklers right now, OK? Each section begins with a wordless series of small panels about a Mowgli-like hunter-gatherer, somewhere at some time. (We will get other hints about him later.) Then the main action begins, set in France in what I think is the present day. (But everyone has flip phones, so maybe it’s supposed to be about ten years ago, sometime in the mid-aughts.)

There are two main clusters of characters, one centered on the middle-aged divorced orthodontist Vincent and his teenage daughter Pauline and the other on the aged ex-radical Louis. There’s also a photographer, not connected to either of those groups, who wanders through the action, another young woman, a little older than Pauline, trying to find her place in the world and work that will give her meaning. There are two kinds of text interruptions to the flow of comics — one is directly the thoughts of the photographer as she grapples with her life, and the other, I think, is her flow-of-consciousness impression of the person she’s just photographed. She adds another level of art to Equnoxes, which already is about, at heart, the big questions: what gives meaning to life, how should we live, how do we relate to each other, what brings people together and pulls them apart.

This is not a book of plot. It is a book of connections and daily life, of moments that feel small at the moment but maybe aren’t, of what to do with today and tomorrow and tomorrow, of the things that break into your life and shake it all up.

If I were French, I think I’d know where this takes place: it’s somewhere specific, I think, a small city on or near the coast. The places in it are real and solid, and we see a few of them repeatedly from different angles and in different seasons.

The people are equally real: Vincent is a bit of an asshole, but he knows it and fights against it. Louis is worn out from his life and detached from the things others think he should engage in. Pauline is quiet except when she explodes, hiding behind earbuds like so many other teenagers. And there are many more — some of whose names we figure out easily, some who appear once in one context and then loop back doing something else, some who only wander through once.

The cover is appropriate both thematically — two people, in a moment of conversation but entirely separate and not looking at each other — and as an important moment of the story. But I’m afraid it will look cold and distant, and this is not a chilly book. Equinoxes does require time and a willingness to let events flow, like an independent film, but it is lovely and true and has a deep wellspring of humanity in it.

I thought Three Shadows was a masterpiece; Equinoxes is as much of one — big and expansive and gorgeous. (Pedrosa is also doing a lot of things with his art — colors for the season and places and people — that I can point to but not explain in any depth.) I enthusiastically recommend it to anyone who cares about people and their lives…which I hope is all of us.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.