The last time this little column went to the MoCCA festival, we came back and churned out a
Top Ten list almost immediately. This time, it took us a few days, and we ditched the whole arbitrary numbering system for the sake of a bullet review round-up of some of what came down the line. Let's dispense with the introductions now, and as Lesane Parish Crooks once said, "Put your mouth on the pistol."
Wait, what?
....Oh, because they're bullets. Still, that's kind of gross.
Your Disease Spread Quick, by Tom Neely
Published by Tom Neely
300 copies of this mini-comic were included with a four-record Melvins box set in 2008, but Neely figured he'd run off a few more for the people who had read his excellent graphic novel
The Blot and said "More please." It's an interesting little mix-em-up project, one that's obviously created more with a Melvins audience in mind than comics fan--but hey, 300 copies for a four-record box set? That's a specific group that's going to catch the song lyrics and horse-head apocalypse, but the Neely fans--of which I'm one--will still find enough to enjoy here. There's a touch of the ink-heavy vomit of
Blot on one page, a two-page spread of Lucifer's bar where Stalin and Hitler are holding court with a variety of history's greatest monsters, and a pretty compelling bit of nonsense that runs through the whole thing. If everybody did "Inspired by" work like this, the world would probably be a....oh, I'm not in the mood for that kind of nonsense. We're all going to die, and the goal should be to have a good time before the shade gets drawn.
Your Disease has some excellent stuff going on it, and if I knew more Melvins albums, I'd have more to say about it.
Brilliantly Ham-Fisted, by Tom Neely
Published by Tom Neely
Nothing against any of the people at MoCCA, but why isn't this Neely guy a superstar? Some of the stuff that you get at MoCCA showcases this amazing level of talent obscured only by youth and inexperience, but
Brilliantly Ham-Fisted is only recognizable to me as what's called a "mini-comic" because I'm buying it from Neely himself. Maybe it's because he doesn't have enough out there yet, or maybe it's because not enough people have checked out
The Blot--whatever it is, it's always a great opportunity to see a cartoonist jack around with the format and release "23 comic strip poems", all of which are presented in the sort of four panel layouts you might see in a newspaper that had wider margins. Similar in tone to the idea that Yoshihiro Tatsumi described at the PEN World Voices event earlier this year (honest work in gag strip panels dealing with emotion), each of these "poems" is a scattershot attack on moment, dealing out a random Ziggy-like joke before watching a little cartoon man slam his head repeatedly against the panels that contain him. On his way out of frame, a voice calls out "I thought he'd never leave." His response?
"That hurt".
The Rack: Year One (Mostly), by Kevin Church & Benjamin Birdie
This is one of those in-print collections of a...popular? I
assume any webcomic I've heard of is popular, because I just read what other people tell me to with webcomics, so I never really know whether what I'm reading online is a big deal or not. It always seems like a big deal. There's probably enough accuracy in the
Rack's soap opera/soap boxing stories of what goes on at the world's most over-staffed comic shop that one could keep up with what's going on in mainstream comics with just this particular comic as their primary source. When it's funny, it's pretty funny, but it probably could have done without the backpage interview, where writer Church likens his style to David Mamet's. Really? There's a really funny joke involving the Machines of Loving Grace that reminds me of the time when my high school girlfriend broke up with me so she could be single at space camp and I spent the whole night in my buddy's closet listening to "Love Is Blindness". That kind of comedy is the kind of comedy I like. It
hurts.
Although there's a lot of solid complaints regarding the prices of some of the mini-comics on sale at the MoCCA convention, there's also stuff like this, a pretty fat collection of comics for only $6.95. Most of the stories revolve around the TITULAR charater, who had a Henry Heywood kind of uncle that grafted gigantic cybernetic arms to his young, armless body. I'd read some of these stories in
Superior Showcase, so I already knew that Dawson could draw and write funny, but I wasn't sure if he could draw ears that didn't look like featureless jug handles--he totally can! There's still that one two-page sequence where a couple of characters have these gigantic things sticking out of their heads, but the rest of the comic doesn't have a single pinna problem. Besides the adventures of the grows-up-to-be-arrogant-then-depressed main character, there's these little insert stories about a couple of terrible super-powered children that points to why super-powered children never work in super-hero comics. At some point, comics creators figured out what Dawson explicates: little kids who have super-powers would end up damaging each other in their fits of rage in ways that, while hilarious, are also somewhat horrible to imagine. Delightful!
Call All My Dawgs #3, by Sam Gaskin
Published by Sam Gaskin
This is a one-page mini-comic about the adventures of Sinbad--the "entertainer", not the swashbuckler--and it involves pooping and hallucinations. I've read all three of Gaskin's
Call All My Dawgs thus far, and I've yet to find a thing to complain about. I hope he sticks with comics forever. The idea that this dude might someday drop a 100-pager of this kind of stuff is an idea that makes my chest feel funny.
Pope Hats #1, by Ethan Rilly
Published by Adhouse
Maybe it's just me, but doesn't it seem like there should be more alternative talky-type comics about characters who are right-wing Republicans or work in the decaying auto industry? It's not Rilly's fault that
Pope Hats is yet another look-at-some-random-white-people comic where jobs exist so that characters can complain about and show up late to them, all the while pining away for the moment when they can "achieve their dream" or "get in a relationship" or whatever it is that moody white people do when they aren't appearing in moody white people comics. It's gotten to the point where I'm not even paying attention to whether the actual comics part of the comics is done well, even when the back half of the comic consists of a basic one-shot repetition of one image over and over again while the main female character tells "a couple of stories", and that's normally something I'd be irritated by.
Pope Hats isn't a stupid comic, and it isn't a lazy one, but it's a subject that I find myself less and less willing to give a shit about, which is sort of insane considering the amount of leeway I'm willing to give to comics about Norman Osborn's
Purpose Driven Life. If it was set in a Montana survivalist camp, if it was about snuff snorting Jiffy Lube employees, maybe so. But white chicks with hopes, a local bar, and a random ghost that steals cell phones? I'm napping already.
Ghost Arm Volume 1 Episode 5, by C. Marie
Handed out by someone, the artist I'm assuming, on the stairs outside.
This is a one sheet comic about a ghost who runs out in the street and gets hit by a car. Oh god man, I'm sorry. SPOILER!
It's actually kind of cute, although I think it's kind of weird that something as simple as this necessitates the inclusion of both a "Volume" and "Episode" numbering. Oh well. There's a link to the
Ghost Arm website on the back, so I guess this is what you call Building A Brand. The world will probably reach the breaking point on the whole anyone-can-do-a-webcomic thing eventually, but hopefully they won't lump anyone-can-do-a-sarcastic-comic-column in, or I'll be back to what I used to do for drug money behind the Winn-Dixie.
Cold Heat Special #9, by Frank Santoro & Lane Milburn
Published by Picturebox
I'm curious as to how much the
Cold Heat Specials interact with the
Cold Heat series proper, as they seem to be purely designed as an opportunity for Santoro to team up with various colloboraters in an attempt to expand and explore Castle, the comic's primary character, and less to do with the narrative. I wouldn't say that the
Specials vary in quality--I've found something I liked in all of them, even the one that was barely more than what looked like Sharpie markings on colored paper--but I haven't found myself thinking of them as being neccessary to the comic's narrative. They remind me of that Wolf Eyes/Anthony Braxton team-up, in that they aren't a full-on studio album with all the wants and cravings that a full-on studio album entails--the
Specials just like to focus on one or two aspects until that one aspect is either exhausted or explained. I don't know, maybe that's just blathering about something I don't fully understand. I really like that they're out there, and this particular issue--a heavy, silkscreened comic where Castle hangs out in an actual castle while digging on the local fireplace--is one I find myself going back to, if just to marvel at the way the art flows across the panels. Like a lot of comics readers, I hope, I come to this stuff knowing there's more to it than can be digested and expelled on the first experience--but as the various
Cold Heat stuff trickles out, I find myself less and less interested in exploring or demanding its meaning. In other words, I really want to spend more time around people who love
Cold Heat. I'm just not as excited by the prospect of hearing them talk about what it means at the same time.
Real Bad #1, by Connur Willumsen
Published by Connur Willumsen
Used my last bits of cash to buy everything I could off Willumsen, based solely off a postcard and a Groo sketch shown to me by my stalwart MoCCA companion, Mr. Matthew J. Brady. Whereas
Real Bad shares some of the "boring white artist with creative blockage goes a-wandering" tendencies that's beginning to irritate me, it's also got a little story-within-the-story portion where Willumsen's narrator fantasizes about the characters in his novel--Noble Savages, cut and tender--slaughter him on his knees. It's a real nice sequence--the first page is a fetish-y drawing of a muscular black arm holding a gigantic machete, juxtaposed against a page where the mutilation is dealt out in all black panels while the victim dispassionately narrates each slice. The conclusion of the book, where our narrator finds his own very real savage to tag along with on their way to falafels and "dive bars", seems to be the set up for future stories, is one that I'm a little apprehensive about--god knows that all it needs is a fumbling homosexual relationship for it to read like that terrible Michael Chabon novel--but not enough that I don't want to see a ton more. Willumsen was also showing off pages for an upcoming comic called
Everett that looked amazing. He's somebody I'll be keeping an eye out for.
Tucker Stone's writing may be found in print in Comic Foundry and online at The Factual Opinion, where he frequently reviews new releases.
This Ship Is Totally Sinking is © Tucker Stone, 2008
