SPX Find #2: Cathy Leamy's Reggie & Brian

Here is my comics pal Cathy Leamy, at this year's SPX:



And here is a closer view of the cover of her newest mini, Reggie & Brian and the Lousy Nickname.



In it, Reggie is a fisherman, perhaps on the Irish coast—he and his fellow fishermen all wear those cabled wool sweaters one associates with Ireland. And Reggie, by far the youngest of the bunch (the only kid in a crowd of grizzled old guys), is tired of being known merely as "Reggie": all his compatriots have nicknames.

His boss thinks it over ...



... and gives him a new monicker:



... but he really doesn't like being called "Crusty," because it's a little embarrassing to have barnacles all over your boat no matter how much you clean it.

Once he's out at sea, Reggie tells his friend Brian (a young merman) about the new nickname, and the barnacle problem, and Brian offers to try to find a solution.



It turns out that Brian can speak the language of barnacles, and he teaches it to Reggie so that Reggie can get them off his boat and earn a new nickname.

I'm not going reveal more about the story, because the final panel is a punchline. In fact, the whole comic is structured like a story-joke, and thinking about Reggie & Brian made me realize that I know a few jokes that would also make pretty good comics. (The one about Einstein's first words would be a good one, for example. Also, maybe the one about the Indian with the World's Greatest Memory.) No telling when I'll find time to draw them, but I suppose that's an idea for a rainy day.

I enjoyed Reggie & Brian, in part because I enjoy the unpretentious friendliness of Cathy's drawing style: it's direct, and very clear, without losing a sense of personal voice or style. I am also happy to add it to my growing pile of kid-friendly minicomics: it's good to know there's more stuff out there that one wouldn't have to hide from a little one.

I'll admit to feeling like Reggie & Brian is sort of slight — the sort of thing that might have been only one story in a longer issue of Geraniums & Bacon, Cathy's serial anthology. It's a sixteen-page story, but it feels short because there's only one page with more than two panels on it: the pages go by quickly. I didn't ask Cathy about this, but I imagine she might be trying to imitate the pacing of a children's book, or to make the book more friendly to early readers.

At any rate, it's a fun little book, and the punchline is pretty funny, too. (I think I had guessed it before I saw it, but that's not necessarily a flaw in a story-joke.)

If you want to get a copy of Reggie & Brian to find out the punchline, you'll find it, along with a bunch of other entertaining minicomics, in Cathy's online store.

As an extra bonus, here's a doodle Cathy put in my dress-your-character-as-a-superhero sketchbook:



That's her own autobiographical persona dressed as Phoenix. Such fun!

SPX Find #1: Shawn Cheng's Counting Comics

I've had time to unpack from my SPX trip now, and I'm starting to sort through the minicomics I obtained there. My plan is to read them slowly, and to write about them as I go, rather than burning through the whole pile in a weekend the way I have in the past.

The first books I have to hand are a couple of sweet little gems from my former student, the Partyka stalwart Shawn Cheng.



Shawn had a couple of new-to-me minis at SPX, both of which have a really pretty opalescent cardstock for covers. They're obviously meant to work as a pair to some extent, because they both feature appealing, stylized drawings of creatures and events from classical mythology, and because they're both set up as counting books. That is, each illustration accompanies a counting number and illustrates some countable detail. It's like an alphabet primer for numbers—a genre we're all familiar with from childhood.

So, in The Numbers of the Beasts, "One is the eye of the Cyclops, Two are the horns of the minotaur," and ...



Three are the necks of Cerberus. You can see a little bit of Shawn's participation in The Road of Knives in these monster drawings, but by and large they're much smoother and much cuter than the drawings in that project.

In Hercules Counts to XII, rather than the parts of mythological creatures, we're counting things from the twelve labors of Hercules, like this:



Five brooms for the Augean stables.

I think Shawn's doing some of his most appealing cartooning ever in these books. The curves of his forms are friendly, stylish, and cute. The objects and animals are stripped down to really basic forms without quite losing the stretchy eccentricity that I associate with Shawn's earlier drawing.

Count those nine kisses for the belt of Hippolyta!



She cuts an intimidating figure, doesn't she? She looks ready to administer a death by snoo-snoo, yet it's the icky kisses that Hercules recoils from. That's a good sign that these are genuinely kid-friendly books, and in fact they're clearly designed for kids, except in that minicomics are probably too flimsy to survive long between the grubby fingers of your standard pre-schooler. If I were a children's-book publisher, I'd be pressuring Shawn for color versions of these cartoons so we could put them between hard covers and charge four times as much for each book.

And look at the graphic-design chops evident in these highly simplified drawings:



I admire the way the figures in Shawn's basilisk drawing ("Eight are the legs...") fill each other's negative space, yet still overlap enough to create depth of field. It's a smart bit of composition, and each of the drawings in these books takes that kind of visual knowhow for granted. I asked Shawn about the change in his drawing style, and he said that these simpler drawings actually take him longer to execute, because everything has to be carefully planned. Looking back over these books, I can easily see what he's talking about.

The Numbers of the Beasts and Hercules Counts to XII aren't in the Partyka store as I write this, but I imagine they'll appear there before long.

Meanwhile, as an extra bonus to this review, here's a sketch or doodle Shawn did for me at SPX, with his characters Whiskey Jack and Kid Coyote (from a different minicomic) dressed as Cyclops and Wolverine.



Thanks, Shawn! Stay tuned, gentle reader, for more minis from SPX.

My Nerdy Sketchbook Collection

I haven't unpacked my SPX minicomics haul yet, so any reviews are going to have to wait at least a little while. But coming home from SPX means a little bit of reflection, for me, on one of my nerdier fan practices. I have a small collection of sketchbooks in which I ask people to draw. Most of them have themes: I ask people to draw something in particular. I know this is a thing that people do at these conventions, and maybe I shouldn't feel sheepish about it. I've seen some much more specific sketchbooks (Sean T. Collins's David Bowie sketchbook comes to mind), and I have tried to make my themes be things that will be fun to draw, but I still feel a little weird about the "collecting" aspect of these things.

Anyway, I'm hoping to add extra interest to some of my upcoming SPX minicomics reviews by showing images from these sketchbooks, and I thought I'd introduce the themes in this post so I could have a context ready for those images later.

The first sketchbook I took to a convention was for MoCCA in 2003, and it doesn't have a theme, but it does have a few treasures in it, like this lightning-quick sketch of Bacchus by Eddie Campbell.



For the next MoCCA I went to, in 2004, I got a new sketchbook and started asking for drawings on a theme. This was the monkey sketchbook that I've already mentioned a few times on the blog.



There's a monkey by Jeffrey Brown from that very MoCCA. The monkey sketchbook has become a real treasure for me. It's got work in it by some terrific cartoonists. It's also almost totally full.

In 2006 I attended ICAF and SPX and forgot my monkey sketchbook, so I ducked into a bookstore in DC and bought a blank book I could use for a new sketchbook. Since I also enjoy drawing robots, I settled on that for the next theme. This drawing by Matt Wiegle (who won an Ignatz this year) is from SPX 2007:



The robot book has many more pages in it than the monkey book, and I'm sure I'll keep toting it to small-press shows until it's full up. But for some reason, for this year's SPX, I decided to start another sketchbook. And because the first theme I thought of might not be fun for everyone, I decided to start two.

I know I've had a lot of fun drawing demons in the past, so I set one book up to be full of demons. Here's a fun one by Scott C.:



The other new book is harder to explain. I ask people to draw the character they usually draw, but dressed as some specific superhero, like they're dressed up for Halloween or a San-Diego-style nerd convention. I let the artists pick their superheroes: "Your favorite one," I say, if they ask. This is not a book that everyone would want to draw in, I think, but for some cartoonists it's going to be pretty fun.

In order to make the theme easier for me to explain, I asked Roger Langridge to draw Fred the Clown as The Mighty Thor to kick things off.



I'll share more images from these various sketchbooks in the weeks to come. (And now I have a surefire source for a quick post if I don't have time to think of anything elaborate.)