Comics for Comics' Sake

It’s easy to get swept up in the enthusiasm and passion on display at APE with small press creators eagerly hocking their own wares, and sometimes the plain sincerity of a sales pitch can override one’s better judgement and lead to some rather dubious purchases. That’s the only excuse I’ve got for picking up Spaceman: Unarmed and Ready to Launch by the Lavapunch collective. It’s an appealingly goofy concept (“The random adventures of a spaceman who’s got no arms!”) that, on even a moment’s reflection, is a pretty thin premise for any workable stories.

So if the reader, on hearing that these stories are not the best, raises an eyebrow and wonders what I was expecting, well, you’d have me there. The stories in this book do indeed have all the depth and wit you’d expect of an anthology focused on a spaceman who’s got no arms.

I’ll at least acknowledge the book’s successes: it starts on a high note with Monica Chen’s “Uma and Pip: A Love Story,” which uses the silliness of the concept for a few good artificial-arms gags, then gets to its sweet conclusion without overstaying its welcome. Chen’s somewhat Rumiko Takahashi-flavored art is also some of the strongest in the book: her panel-to-panel storytelling is clear and easy to follow, which is important in any comic but doubly so in an mostly silent strip like “Uma and Pip.”

“Escape Velocity,” the story by Jillian Ogle and Evon Freeman that closes out the book, also has a nice moment that draws on the kaleidoscopic nature of an anthology for a big heroic finish. The actual plot of the strip is cliched, but at least it’s knowingly so–at one point, Captain Spaceman finds a map of the villain’s ship helpfully labeled “Enemies,” “Girl,” and “You Are Here.”

Finally, Alex Ahad’s gag strip “Unarmed and Dangerous” hits the right tone for the material he’s working with, though being chopped up into four-page segments sprinkled throughout the book doesn’t help the pacing. It would have worked better if the groan-worthy jokes about an inexplicably villainous version of Captain Spaceman being “caught red-handed” by the “long arm of the law” were allowed to accumulate, but it works well enough even as is.

The rest of the book is, bluntly, a mess. It’s clear that Lavapunch is primarily an artist’s collective by the way nearly every story falls into one of two pitfalls: it has lovely but unreadable art that fails to convey the ambitious ideas the creator was aiming for (Alpha Gamboa’s “Untitled” and Konstantin Pogorelov’s “The Path of Moderate Resistance”) or it hits the other extreme of a collection of deliberately crudely-drawn puerile jokes (Robert Iza’s “The Ballad of Captain Spaceman” and Teerawat Palanitisena’s “Captain Spaceman and the Temple of Shrooms,” which was so witless I actually fell asleep reading it).

Chalk at least some of it up to the perennial problem of anthologies feeling like a collection of B-sides; I doubt many of the creators were putting forth their best effort for a bunch of strips with such a lame shared premise, and I can’t really fault them for it. That said, if an anthology is meant to be a collective’s calling card, it does behoove its members to try a little harder than this–I can’t say I’m eager to look further into the work of any of the individual creators based on their representation in Spaceman. There are several other anthologies lurking somewhere in The Stack, so fingers crossed they do a better job at putting over their members as talents worth following.

IF LAVAPUNCH EXHIBITS AT NEXT YEAR’S APE I WILL: Walk on by.

Hello. It’s been nearly a year since I last blogged here; another APE has come and gone, and The Stack is now even bigger. So I’m going to revisit the concept and try to stick with it this time. Starting with a pair of minis by “reportage cartoonist” Susie Cagle, This Is What Concerns Me and I’m Here From The Government.

This Is What Concerns Me is a short sampling of one-page strips that I gather are compiled from her eponymous website. How you react to her taken-from-life vignettes will probably depend a lot on how much time you’ve spent in San Francisco, where Cagle lives and works. Subjects like hippie stench, vegan shopping, and random crazies on the street are probably more interesting if they’re new to you and not everyday facts of life.

Cagle’s actual storytelling is more interesting than her choice of stories to tell here. The one- and two-page material at the front of the book is all right, but she’s at her best when she gives herself space to let a story breathe. The two-and-a-half “Security” strips in the 13-page book showcase her skill for evocative recreations of San Francisco’s distinct environs, all sloped sidewalks, tall brick buildings, and unassuming walk-by shops. She uses a much looser style in these strips than in I’m Here From the Government, but it’s still effective at capturing her own unease and irritation, as well as the creepiness of the characters she encounters.

If you only read one of the two, however, I’m Here From The Government is the one to go for. This is the one where Cagle lives up to her title and provides some intriguing cartoon reportage on what it’s like to be a census taker. (Or Enumerator, to use the official term. See, it’s educational!)

Pretty much the only thing I knew about enumerators prior to reading this was hearing stories of paranoid fringe lunatics attacking them during the 2010 census, wholly convinced that they were agents of the New World Order keeping tabs on them for some future mass roundup into indoctrination camps. Cagle worked in the rather more liberal San Francisco, so if you’re hoping for tense tales of confrontations with belligerent responders, you won’t find them here. (Though there are hints of danger evident in the safety training seminar the enumerators receive, with advice such as “Wear comfortable walking shoes. These may come in handy should there be a need to run.”)

These stories are more procedural; half the book is devoted to the training sessions before Cagle takes a step onto the streets to poll people. What’s most impressive about these sections is how much went into the preparation before Cagle drew a single line. It’s clear from the specific details given at every step, from reproductions of the actual test questions Cagle answered to get the job to a dizzying array of jargon and acronyms peppering the dialogue, that Cagle took thorough notes during the process for later use. (One of the chapters is even titled “Verbatim.”)

Once the enumerators are out in the field, the tone bounces around between comedic (the enumerators joking around about “Census Regionals”), informative (did you know government writing utensils are made by Skilcraft, a manufacturer created to employ blind workers? I didn’t!), and uncomfortable (“Operation TNSOL,” a night spent cataloguing the homeless in park spaces, makes effective use of garbled dialogue balloons to convey Cagle’s fear and shame).

The line in these stories is thicker and more solid than the scratchiness of This Is What Concerns Me, which goes a long way toward improving its readability. Cagle’s gift for faces and expressions is put to even better use here with the expanded cast–the enormous mouth and huge-pupiled stare on Cagle’s CL makes her even more memorable as a character, especially in contrast with her thin-lipped, perpetually-silent assistant.

IF SUSIE CAGLE EXHIBITS AT NEXT YEAR’S APE I WILL: Pick up more of her long-form/reportage comics and skip the collections of one-offs.

And so The Stack grows.

For the fifth or sixth year now, I went to the Alternative Press Expo at the Concourse in San Francisco. This year, it was a little special because it fell on my 30th birthday, and I have to say: any kind of life where I can spend my 30th birthday at a comics convention is a pretty good one in my book.

The thing that impresses me most, every time I go, is how many people got out there, made some comics, and are there at APE letting their work speak for them. Even the hackiest, most cheaply photocopied minis took effort and courage to get down on paper and on the show floor. I’ve made tentative steps, once, toward producing my own comic, but going to APE always gets me motivated to give it another stab. (No pun intended.) Will I have something to show by APE 2011, or will I be there solely in a consumer capacity once again? We’ll see.

Not that going there just to buy stuff is a bad time. I buy comics at APE the way some people buy hurricane supplies–gotta stock up, because it could be a long time before you have another opportunity. The full list of my haul, as well as photos of the books and some snapshots of the con itself, are after the jump.

(more…)

I’ve been to the Alternative Press Expo every year since I first moved to San Francisco in 2004; even now that I live in Orange County, I still make an annual trip back up to the Bay to attend. I love small press stuff and minicomics and always spend much too much sampling things at random; if there’s an booth that looks interesting, I’ll always try to get at least one of their wares to take home with me.

But I haven’t been so good, necessarily, at actually reading those comics once I get them. They tend to be filed away somewhere on a shelf–or worse, on a permanent stack on the floor near a bookshelf somewhere. One of my goals in starting up a comics blog was to motivate myself to unearth those stacks, discover what’s in them, and write about it. And I’ll start with Why Did I Put This Town On My Face? by Matt Wiegle, which I seem to have picked up at last year’s show.

It’s a short minicomic of 32 pages, and maybe I should explain what a minicomic is for those of you not into the indie-comics scene. These are photocopied, hand-stapled creations produced in limited print runs by amateur artists. More than anything else this blog will cover, minicomics are literally comics for comics’ sake: they’re created out of a pure impulse of expression divorced from any attempt at making money. And as such, they can get pretty damned weird.

Wiegle’s minicomic, a collection of pieces that had appeared in other anthologies, is a good example of what I’m talking about. “Good” in both senses of the word: it typifies the genre and it’s also well-executed, which is hardly a given when you’re talking about random minicomics purchased at APE. A lot of them can be pretty awful, in fact, and out of respect for their creators’ courage in putting their work out there for public consumption I probably won’t be touching on those should I find one in The Stack.

The stories in WDIPTTOMF are short and whimsical. Most of them are surreal one-gag affairs, like the story about a man buried up to his jaw, and the humor is derived more from the strangeness of the stories more than a punchline. There’s not much plot to speak of–these vignettes barely qualify as one-acters– and the stories stand or fall mainly on Wiegle’s wavy, thin-lined art style.

Wiegle’s other strength is his ability to keep the ideas coming. The best piece in the book, the title of which is irreproducible since it’s just a picture of an anchor, is about a tattooed man invading an art gallery showing with the intention of using his power to bring art to life in order to make some ill-defined point. It’s only five pages long, but Wiegle puts a lot in there: a pair of freeloading students only interested in crashing the snack table, a lovelorn art critic, and the tattooed man himself, who’s worked out a system of using his tattoos to support himself in everyday life. Also, David Bowie with his legs chopped off.

In the end, there isn’t much to say about minis like this without just summarizing the already-thin pieces, so posts in The Stack series will probably end up being more review-y than other writeups, using the following as a form of final judgement:

IF MATT WIEGLE EXHIBITS AT THIS YEAR’S APE I WILL: Probably buy another of his minis if I happen across his booth.