Alphabooksbeasts: B is for Bobo

For this week's non-Donjon Alphabooks character, I'm choosing a little chimpanzee who has recently become dear to my heart.

This week, B is for Bobo.

Maybe you've never heard of this cute little guy. I had no knowledge of him before the last few months, but now I sort of adore him. He's the star of three picture books: Hug, Tall, and Yes. Hug is a current favorite around my house.

In it, Bobo wanders through the jungle and the savannah, gradually realizing that all of the other animals have someone to cuddle, and he's alone.

(Bonus: sequential images. "Where's Bobo?" is an interesting question for this two-page spread.)

When his loneliness finally takes over, Bobo lets out a tortured barbaric yawp (which is also the word "hug," but in huge wavy letters), then settles down amidst the other animals to cry to himself.

Don't worry; the story has a happy ending. Bobo's mother finds him, and there are several really happy hugs at the end of the book.

I know it's sappy and a little too sweet, but I think Jez Alborough's cartooning is fun, and the colors in the book are gorgeous. I have read this book at least once a day for the past several months, and although the dialogue only uses three words, I am not bored with it. That's a strong endorsement, right?

Bobo was actually pretty hard for me to figure out, as a drawing. He's such a top-heavy little coffee-bean. I tried and tried. Eventually I got close, but I think copying Jez Alborough gave me something like my Mercer Mayer problem: these are just not character designs (or curves) that I would naturally come up with on my own.

Next week: a very ancient and fishlike smell.

Alphabeasts: S is for Sand Bug

This week's Alphabeasts drawing is from maybe the second most obscure source I'm going to tap for this project, but it's also one of my real favorites. I figure there are really only two possible relations a comics reader can have to Kazimir Strzepek's The Mourning Star: fandom or ignorance. In other words, if you've heard of it, you probably love it.

The reason it's so appealing, at least to me, is the pervasive sense of a completely imagined world, with its own cultures and problems, its own languages and sports, and of course its own fauna. From out of that fauna comes the sand bug, the eggs of which infest the water in the desert wastes then (if you make the mistake of drinking them) consume you from inside while the desert sun withers you.

Watch out, because S is for sand bug.



(Yeah, I drew it busting out of that particular spot on the skull in a tribute to my recent sinus surgery. My recovery is going fine.)

The vibe in The Mourning Star is somewhere between D&D, skate punk rock, Kung Fu, and Mad Max: a civilization in ruins, populated by characters with cute faces and hard attitudes; everyone struggling to survive, often in awesome action setpieces with brutal martial arts involving knives and scissors. And you definitely get the sense that there's more to the world than what you're seeing, which is the best test of worldbuilding.



If you've got the dough to spare, I suggest picking up the first volume of The Mourning Star somewhere other than Amazon, where (as of this writing) the cheapest copy is going for more than $260. I'm a big enough fan of Strzepek's work that I've even swiped it wholesale in the past, for the last page of our "Stepan Crick" story, but even I would balk at a figure like that. (Plus, there are copies for sale in other places. There's a tip for some "inve$ticomics" that might actually pay off.)

Anyway, there's only one scene (so far) that features a sand bug, and at the time we don't really get a clear look at it. We don't even learn the name of the creature until the second volume. Early in volume 1, though, the amnesiac snipper sniper fights one:





Right before this fight, he drinks from the canteen of the dead man the sand bug is growing from. (He doesn't know the creature's ecology until later, when he remarks that it sounds "familiarly terrible.") Should we be expecting the snipper sniper to explode with a sand bug in a few more volumes? It's only one of a bunch of loose threads and cliffhangers that have me on tenterhooks waiting for the next volume. One of the latest posts on Kaz Strzepek's blog hints that Volume 3 is close to finished. I am super psyched about that. There really aren't many comics I anticipate more eagerly.

Next week: creatures I swiped a drawing of back when I was doing the Animal Alphabet.

Alphabeasts: H is for Heffalump

It's the end of the term, and I should really be grading papers instead of drawing. I was joking last night about taking a close-up picture of some melted cheese on top of a pizza and passing it off as a Horta, but in fact I'm saving my Star Trek Alphabeast for a monster even dearer to my stupid heart in its way.

Instead, this week's Alphabeasts entry comes from one of my favorite books in all of Modernist fiction, and certainly my favorite such book to read aloud. That's not Ulysses, believe it or not, but Pooh. This week, H is for Heffalump.



That's a bit of a quickie drawing (with quickie coloring), and I'm not too happy with it, but I tried to make the heffalump a little different from merely a more familiar pachyderm up on its hind legs.

I am dimly aware that Disney has once again defiled the Pooh stories by creating some sort of cutesy, plush, kawaii abomination in a so-called Heffalump Movie—you may click here to see images, but beware that they are horrible and cannot be unseen. In fact, if you are a parent, I think it is crucial that you do not allow your children to see those images until they are well familiar with Ernest Shepard's original decorations.

There are two actual images of the Heffalump, in nightmare visions by Piglet and by Pooh. It is a creature of the nervous imagination, possibly even Very Fierce with Bears and Pigs. Only Christopher Robin has (possibly) ever actually seen one. The images I'm linking to are, really, conjecture at best.

And yet there is a chapter in Winnie-the-Pooh in which "Piglet Meets a Heffalump."

If you have never read this story, or indeed if you have never read it aloud, I exhort you to find a copy and read it before you hit my spoiler image below. This isn't the only time I've recommended the books, but let me say that Milne's Pooh books are great to read aloud, because they have a lot of little quirks and jokes that only appear as the reader makes the words on the page into sounds. If you haven't read the originals, and think of Pooh only as that Disneyfied pabulum, then you owe it to yourself (and anyone you read to) to put the real books in your hands. They're wonderful.

Okay, are you ready for the spoiler? In the chapter in which Pooh and Piglet resolve to trap a heffalump (despite Piglet's anxiety), Pooh himself winds up in the bottom of their Very Deep Pit, with his head stuck in an empty honey-jar. The very moment when he makes a "loud, roaring noise of Sadness and Despair" is the moment when Piglet peeks into the Pit to find out what they've caught.

This is the Heffalump that Piglet meets.



Next week: an irreverent creature from an alphabestiary I loved when I was a tot.

The One-Panel Critics: The Peril of Art

That's a little envelope doodle that appeared in my mailbox this week from New Zealand. Dylan Horrocks has a new minicomic!

You can order your copy using this link (and Paypal).

It's a "conversation jam," similar to those Kochalka/Thompson and Kochalka / Brown conversations that Top Shelf published, between Horrocks and the writer Emily Perkins. In their conversation, Horrocks and Perkins start with the question of why we write stories, and the talk drifts pretty quickly to Horrocks's anxieties about whether fiction (or any story) can really tell the truth about living.

"We're still in thrall to narrative unity ... resolution and catharsis," Perkins says. "Maybe the lie is not in metaphor but in structure."

Horrocks replies:



I'd argue that metaphor and structure don't need to be easy or simple, but I can see why Horrocks has some anxiety about this.

It's is actually a topic we've been discussing in my graphic-novel course, relative to Maus and the implicit structures of memoir: from the perspective of Rego Park, it's easy to construe Vladek's survival as a story of resourcefulness, smart decisions, necessary ruthlessness and scrupulous generosity. But while those events are being lived, there's no way to assess their value or their wisdom: Vladek could have made the same decisions, or other decisions on the same principles, and not have survived after all. It's only the post-facto construction of a story (or the opportunity to reflect and construct such a story) that makes Vladek heroic.

And there are elements in the logic of such a story that deceive, in some fundamental way, about lived experience. In the case of Maus, Vladek's story might seem to imply something about the capability of a wily and resourceful person to survive the Holocaust; this would in turn imply that the millions of victims had failed, in some way, to rise to heroic levels of self-preservation. Objectively, we'd never say that about the Holocaust victims, but something about the nature of narrative implies it anyway, contrary to anything we (or Spiegelman) would want to believe.

(Did I just run afoul of Godwin's law?)



It isn't merely that reality has too many details to fit into a comics panel, or that too many events take place for a memoirist to represent them all. The problem isn't simply one of completeness. It's that the structures of literature (and, as some might argue, even the structures of memory) necessarily distort reality, and in ways that we should probably find alarming: not distortions of fact, but distortions of the value of facts; structures and analogies of meaning.

Of course, maybe we could argue that until these distorting structures of narrative, analogy, and value are used on the materials of experience, there's no way to assess meaning at all. "We [tell] [stories] lest we perish from [inconsequentiality]; we [create] [structure] lest we perish from [chaos]."

Or something like that.



Thanks for the thought-provoking mini, Dylan. (And for the envelope doodles!) Everyone else, why not order a copy? It's smart stuff.

SPX Find #5: Laura Terry's Thousand Lies

Here's one of my favorite things from the SPX minicomics stack so far:



Laura Terry is a recent graduate from the Center for Cartoon Studies, and based on One Thousand Lies, I'd say I'm looking forward to seeing more comics from her.

One Thousand Lies is a story about a wanderer named Arnold, as he checks in with his godmother, a high-power lawyer named Victoria. Arnold convinced Victoria to take him out to lunch, and in return she asks him to tell stories from his travels.




(Let's hold on to that intersection between stories and lies until tomorrow. I have another post in mind.)

What Arnold comes up with are three odd vignettes, each of which takes place in a town with its own skewed logic: Sunderland, where philosophers congregate on the jungle gym and love waits in the morgue; Buffalo Gap, where half of the population is transient; and Enoch, which has been designed to capture and reflect the harmony of the universe.



There's a bit of The Thousand and One Nights in this premise, even if Arnold is singing for his supper instead of to save his head. (The connection is strong enough that I wondered why the lies in the title fall short by one.) There's also more than a little of Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities in the imagination of each peculiar geographical vignette. It's not hard to imagine this book being extended into more chapters, each of which would have three or five stories of improbably towns with puzzling problems.

It's also really nice to sense so clearly that the cartoonist reads something other than comics. I mean, I know that comics are the best place to learn to make comics, but to extend the medium, or to stretch a genre, the cartoonist needs to know what's beyond his or her most immediate antecedents. Won't the best stories always come from people who read lots of kinds of stories?



I also feel a lot of influence from Matt Madden behind this book. I might just be imagining that because Victoria looks to me a little bit like Matt's character Lance (from Odds Off—you know, the guy whose writing catches "word lice"). But there's also something about the cheery, intellectual familiarity between Arnold and Victoria that reminds me of some of Matt's other characters. And of course the appeal to Calvino and, behind that, Scheherazade is something that would appeal to Matt.

Anyway, I liked this book a lot, partly for its promise, and partly for what it delivers. There's some nice, solid cartooning here, but the real interest is in the story, and in the process of storytelling.

If I had to mount a bit of conservative criticism, it'd be that the scenes between Arnold and Victoria seem to drag a little bit — I'm not sure whether they could be compacted from two six-panel pages each down to a single eight-panel page, for example, or if the splash-page transition could be turned into a half-page panel with some editing — but that's really a minor misgiving about what's otherwise a fun, interesting, smart, and attractive minicomic.

I'm hoping to see more from Laura Terry.

And lo, sure enough, here is more from her, courtesy of my robot doodle book:



Thanks, Laura! I hope you'll let me know when your next comic is ready!

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.

Siena Find #3: La Bambina Filosofica

I'm happy to report that during my expedition to locate some interesting Italian comics, I didn't wind up empty-handed. I found two volumes collecting comic strips and other drawings of La Bambina Filosofica ("The Philosophical Little Girl") by Vanna Vinci.



(Those titles are Anatomy of a Mess and Thoughts, Sayings, Works, and Omissions, respectively.)

Although I can't really read Italian, I am really enjoying these books: the cartooning is straightforward, expressive, and fun; the Bambina and her associates are interesting characters; and I'm able to half-translate enough of the text that I'm able to get most of the jokes in a squinty, half-heard sort of way.

It's really easy to like the Bambina. She starts the first book still in her mother's womb, refusing to be delivered — first claiming to be a political refugee, then shouting that she's busy on the internet. Once her mother bribes her by offering to buy her a scooter, she emerges and starts learning to walk, to speak ("Merda" is her first postpartum word), and to bite.



After her playmate's mother summons a child psychologist to deal with the Bambina, she is only sorry that her foxhole isn't equipped with the right weapons to fight him:


("Unfortunately, I only have smart bombs," she mutters.)

By the way, I encourage you to click-and-enlarge any and all of the strips in this post: Vinci has a really appealing line, and you'll be able to read the text and the facial expressions better at a larger size.

My favorite sequence that I've read so far has the Bambina's mother offering to buy her a birthday present. At first, the idea is that she'll get a Barbie doll ("Why? So I can play 'plastic surgeon'?" the Bambina asks). But once they're at the store, her mother changes her mind ...


... Barbie is "anti-educative" and gives a "distorted image of women." I mean, "Just look at those tits!")

The Bambina's mother tries out a baby doll ...


... and the Bambina rejects it as too cute, too mawkish, too saccharine. "Quick! Play me some Motorhead before it's too late!" she gasps.

And then she meets the toy that will be her constant companion for the rest of the strip: Lillo.



It melts my heart to see a cynical little girl fall in love with a stuffed gorilla. In the next strip, she says she has always wanted a stuffed gorilla. "Finally, a comprehensive hominid," she coos, "Who will listen to me without saying a word!"

One of the other things I like about the Bambina Filosofica books is that they are punctuated with recipes, questionnaires, illustrated quotations from philosophers, spot illustrations, and mock paper-doll costumes that put the Bambina into different contexts in the name of fun. Check out this adorable bestiary, in which she is transformed into a hoopoe, a vampire sparrow, a tyrannosaurus ...



... and a porcupine, ready to attack!



I'm not sure whether Vanna Vinci is making any attempt to find an English-language publisher or translator, and I don't know what her chances would be in the American comics market. I'm not sure to what extent her sense of humor would "translate." But I know that if I ever see more volumes of Bambina Filosofica, or if anyone brings them into English, I'll be buying them.

In fact, I'm so besotted with this comic strip that I've done some translations of my own. Click these to enlarge and read:






These last two are especially suitable for the advent of the new fall semester:




I can do a few more of those some time if you like. By the way, I had picked those to translate (and done the translating) before I realized the originals are on the Bambina Filosofica site. But now you can pop over there and check my translation if you like.

The One-Panel Critics: the Vanity of Swamp Thing

It's been nearly a month since my last measly post, and I don't think I'm going to break any postyness records for July, either. But here's a little something I noticed recently.

I've been re-reading my old Swamp Thing paperbacks, thinking about the storytelling as well as the story there, and I noticed a couple of panels from the slow build at the end of Saga of the Swamp Thing #30 ("A Halo of Flies") that I hadn't paid attention to before. Probably I had skipped past these quickly because they're pantomime (there's no text to read), which is a shame, because they build up to an awfully strong final-page reveal—one that anticipates the rug-jerking surprise at the end of the eleventh issue of Watchmen, in its small way.

Here are those panels I mentioned.



Maybe you're already seeing what I saw.

Even if you're not an avid Swamp Thingophile, you may be familiar with Bernie Wrightson's cover to House of Secrets #92, which included the first Swamp Thing story:



(This image borrowed from the Grand Comics Database, like the next image.)

This story was later reprinted, with a new framing tale around it, in Saga of the Swamp Thing #33, with John Totleben providing a cover swipe or homage from Wrightson's original—with the post-Alec-Holland Swamp Thing's sweetheart, Abby Cable, in the place of Linda Olsen.



By now you've probably figured out what I've noticed: the elaborate vanity setup that the silent swamp monster stalks past on his way to Abby's curtained four-poster bed.



My hunch is that this is an earlier homage to House of Secrets 92. Maybe Steve Bissette will correct me if I'm wrong about this, but I think it's deliberate.

As he looms through the house, Swamp Thing is framed to look like a monster, even though he's the hero of the tale, and the "cinematics" of the scene help to build a really nice sense of foreboding that the chapter's conclusion pays out in spades. It's a nice touch—and a subtle thing to notice more than two decades after the comic was originally published.