Sparkplug, Tugboat Press and Teenage Dinosaur's joint Free Comic Book Day offering
Bird Hurdler is a solidly crafted sampler of work from indy-comic names such as Andrice Arp and Farel Dalrymple, journeymen Zack Soto and Theo Ellsworth and neophytes Julia Gfrörer and Lisa Rosalie Eisenberg.
It opens with
Gfrörer's apparently untitled contribution: six pages long, it's two stacked four-panel sequences per page and hypnagogic logic — the slightly sketchily drawn protagonist "Julia" eats some carrots, turns orange and can see in the dark, and then has a run-in with the testy "Witch King" — calls to mind Jesse Reklaw's
Slow Wave strip. Unlike
Slow Wave, however, Gfrörer's piece never becomes more than mildly amusing, perhaps because its flights of fancy are confined entirely to talking heads.
I found the two-pager by Arp (who is published in
Mome by my employer, Fantagraphics) about an Amtrak trip amounted to little less than an anecdote. I much preferred her evocative cover, around which a reader could imagine his or her own narratives. (It also works in images of all of the publishers involved, including a symbol for Arp's own Hi-Horse collective.)
Soto's six-pager runs two visual metaphors for a troubled relationship on top of one another, while in "A Thanksgiving Feast," Eisenberg clean-line cartoons a vignette about the tensions generated when one member of a half-vegetarian couple decides to cook a turkey, framed by a talking-cat klatch. Ultimately the animals in the comic prove to be of greater interest, both visually (or maybe I'm a sucker for a paw-clenching anthropomorphic feline, but the turkey with a fearful premonition is pretty funny too) and in terms of dialogue, than the drippy humans who say things like "I mean, I'm forfeiting my dietary principles for them and they still act so rude to you."
Dalrymple's "Gwen and Em in: Magic Spell, part two" is so visually arresting that it freezes the eyes to the panels, rather than guides them; in other words, it's almost too pretty to read. Those who do manage to progress past the expertly placed spotted blacks, fluid facial expressions, detailed backgrounds and lively figure-work to the dialogue, however, will be rewarded with a couple of bon mots, if not quite a self-contained story (it's a perfect little teaser, though: I'm certainly intrigued by Gwen and Em's next enterprise).
Bird Hurdler concludes with Theo Ellsworth's "Sleep Disrupter," drawn in Ellsworth's signature densely textured, crosshatched style: the storytelling structure is very similar to a
Little Nemo strip, in which strange and fantastical events take place while the protagonist is dreaming. (There's also a cat.
Bird Hurdler appears to have an equal number of cats and birds (and quite lot of fish) in it, but on the whole, it's a fairly pro-cat collection.)
Bird Hurdler is accessible (for mature readers) and the table of contents lists both a website where more of each artist's work can be viewed, as well as their contact info. (As someone who routinely looks at minicomics for professional purposes, the only other thing the compilers could have done to get a 100% on my internal checklist of features that makes a cataloger/researcher/writer's life easier is to number the pages. However, it's only 32 pp., so perhaps that makes up for it.) In terms of content and packaging,
Bird Hurdler is pretty close to my ideal for the FCBD event, as goes beyond its function as a professionally presented business card/introduction to cartoonists and projects to watch out for to become a work worth reading and rereading in its own right.
All panels ©2009 respective creators
Kristy Valenti currently works for The Comics Journal and Fantagraphics Books, Inc.
Uncharted Territory is © Kristy Valenti, 2008
Sparkplug, Tugboat Press and Teenage Dinosaur's joint Free Comic Book Day offering Bird Hurdler is a solidly crafted sampler of work from indy-comic names such as Andrice Arp and Farel Dalrymple, journeymen Zack Soto and Theo Ellsworth and neophytes Julia Gfrörer and Lisa Rosalie Eisenberg. 
