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Friday, September 3, 2010
SPX Reviews
Shawn shares the wealth of his SPX spoils
Okay, I’ve finally managed to read a bit from that intimidating box of SPX goodies over the last week. Luckily, I have the time on the bus to and from work to read comics. This week, I offer up two books and a handful of mini-comics for your consideration.
Books:
When I’m Old and Other Stories – Gabrielle Bell (Alternative Comics)
This was the first thing I read on the plane home from SPX. Immediately, I realized that I had made a mistake in not reading this book sooner. It was one of those books that received positive reviews, but I never noticed it in the store locally. After it dropped off my radar, I found myself picking up the book at SPX because of its striking cover. Once I opened it, I was struck by Bell’s imagination and storytelling abilities. On the first page of the first story, “Amy Was a Babysitter”, she narrates, “The one thing that distinguished her most as a great babysitter was her ability to captivate anyone around with her imaginative stories.” The same could be said for Gabrielle Bell. From the babysitter piece to the two-part “Just One Reason”, Bell shows a startling gift for grabbing your attention with her stories and art.
In “Graveyard Shift”, Bell rides to the top of a mountain on her bicycle. Once at the top, she feels so much bigger than the town lit up below. Then she sees two midgets kissing, “Suddenly it seemed to me that everyone was a midget! I thought maybe it was some kind of a convention or tour of some kind. Then I realized it was ME! I was growing!” The rest of the story features the awkward narrator trying not to crush cars and buildings as she hurries to make her shift as a waitress at the local diner.
Bell adapts a Herman Hesse story, “The Fairy Tale about the Wicker Chair”, and a D.H. Lawrence story “The Virgin and the Gypsy”, but her own stories are what pack the most artistic punch. She relates a fairy tale of her own called “On the Seashore”, where a young woman sits on a beach with her newborn baby. She’s depressed and unhappy with having a baby to take care of at her young age. As the young woman sifts through her mistake and the repercussions, she starts to feel bad about her feelings. She thinks a shower may cure her malaise, but it seems her situation is only temporary. In the hands of another artist, the ending might have seemed trite or too convenient, but in Bell’s hands there is a natural flow from the beach to the shower to the ending that works seamlessly. It leaves the reader as light and joyful as the young woman in the story.
The tales in When I’m Old are collected from what appears to be a four to five year period of self-publishing. The art jumps around from a thinner angular penciling to a more lush smoother style. Her maturation as an artist is noticeable, and I personally prefer the thicker lines of what I’m guessing are her later stories. All of the pieces in this book are worth your time, as Bell’s imagination and ability sets her apart from your average storyteller, but the later stories accompanied by the thicker brushstrokes add a bit more depth to the experience as a reader. Bottom line, this is a fantastic collection and at $12.95 for 128 pages, it’s a bargain.
Bighead – Jeffery Brown (Top Shelf Productions)
You’ve got to be kidding me, a whole collection of Jeffrey Brown riffing on super heroes? I’m familiar with Brown’s take on relationships and his brutal honesty about his own shortcomings with women, but super heroes? From the Top Shelf website:
Witness inept villains clash with an all-too-emotional hero, in the epic graphic novel that will leap all clichés in a single bound. BIGHEAD brings together moral fable, social commentary and classic comic book action, featuring a superhero who must save an unthankful world while facing the demons of his own failures.
They’re not kidding and thankfully, for $12.95, you too can purchase 128 pages of hot, over-the-top Bighead action. After the handy diagram of Bighead’s many powers, including an “[i]nquisitive mind, like a kitten or small child,” “super-fast running speed” and “massively powerful fist,” Brown wastes no time in getting to the action. First up, ninjas! Bighead has little trouble with a gang of ninjas, but more difficulty with later super villains like Bullman, Gigantico, Race Car, Heartbroke, Dr. Doctoro, and the dastardly handsome pipe smoker, The Brit. The latter villain, The Brit, is the one that seems to give Bighead the most trouble. The Brit has somehow managed to charm the love of Bighead’s life, Rebessica, into marriage.
Bighead is a sensitive fellow and the news of Rebessica’s impending marriage to The Brit is hard for our hero to swallow. Does he tell Rebessica about The Brit, or confront The Brit and try to foil his plans? It’s a difficult decision for Bighead, but eventually he gives his blessing for the two to marry and moves on. After all, he has fights waiting with Crabby, Girl Hair, and the Temptationress, not to mention a duel with his arch nemesis Smallhead. In his fight with Crabby, who has crab claws (one of them massive and powerful) instead of hands, Bighead defeats Crabby by giving him a kitten. The concluding panels of the battle show Crabby proclaiming, “Your gift has taught me a valuable lesson, Bighead. I must treat others the way I wish myself to be treated…and with this kitten I will learn to put the needs of another being ahead of my own…Thank you Bighead and Mr. Purrkins thanks you also.”
Bighead is great, great fun to read; it crackles with energy and a love for the genre of the super hero. Brown takes the silly conventions that weigh down the “cape and tights” books and sets them free with a wink and an elbow. He obviously had a lot of fun writing and drawing these stories, but it’s the reader who benefits from his time and effort. The book is drawn is Brown’s signature scratchy style, which may be disconcerting for readers not familiar with his art, but if you give Brown and his hero a chance, you’ll be laughing out loud.
Mini-comics:
Only the Lonely is an anthology of “lonely, sensitive boy” stories edited by Josh Frankel in a mini-comic format. The stories are meant to poke fun at the emotionally centered books drawn by sad boys and almost every piece pulls this off with great success. There are nine stories, including the appropriately titled “Gummi Bears Taste Like Loneliness” and “Oh No! Leaves are Falling”. In “Gummi Bears”, you’re treated to lines like “Your lips tasted like Tootsie Rolls. It was so sweet I started to cry. Then you went away,” and “I see you laugh and again I cried. My tears taste like Gummi Bears.” In “Oh No! Leaves are Falling”, Tom Neely paints a poignant portrait of a young gentleman that is so saddened by falling leaves, all he can do is think about his absent girlfriend and masturbate. One hilarious Chris Ware inspired page has twenty panels of call and response consisting of falling leaves and masturbation. It starts with a falling leaf, “And…” then masturbation, “So…” another falling leaf, “Then…” more masturbation, “And…” Yes, it’s silly like most of the stories in here, but Only the Lonely is satire that works. You can check out sample pages, including a two-page spread of Alixopulos, and buy a copy of Only the Lonely at USS Catastrophe for three dollars.
The beauty of a show like SPX is in finding comics from people who you may never heard of before. I picked up a trio of minis from new discovery Joey Weiser. Each of these two-dollar mini-comics is attractively packaged with color paper covers and good quality artwork inside. They all had a date of 2004 on them, meaning Weiser has been very busy this year. Zoomorphic Funnies is sixteen pages of hit and miss animal humor. The best story is “Flight” about a porcine pilot who rescues a crocodile damsel who is not what she seems. Tales of Unusual Circumstance was more appealing to me, thanks to an excellent opening story about a group of monster kids playing in a sandbox. This story was full of energy and physical humor that works well with Weiser’s tight art style. This sixteen-page comic ends with a scathing and well-written critique of MTV. The last mini, an eight-page single storybook, was my favorite of the three. Every panel of The Unremarkable Tree Frog serves to communicate the story to the reader. Nothing is wasted and the little details are perfectly rendered. In this comic a bit more than the others, Weiser shows how well he understands graphic storytelling. These minis were a great surprise find for me SPX and I’ll be eagerly looking out for anything else with Joey Weiser’s name on it. He’s got an email address listed as jweise20@student.scad.edu
Another unknown to me mini-comic artist is first timer, Douglas Frey. The Magpie Vol. 1 doesn’t look like a first attempt, although it could be a first attempt by someone intent on making the most of their initial comic. The Magpie succeeds in both story and art. The cover is fashioned out of handsome brown textured paper with the screeching magpie character outlined in red ink. Inside, the art has a vintage feel. The magpie character is a tall lanky bird, who uses a walking stick and wears a distinctive top hat. He’s cantankerous and violent towards those who anger or oppose him, at times resorting to physically intimidating or harming people with his stick and enormous sharp beak. The only people in the story who land on his good side are the fair maiden he loves from afar and the drunkard who shares a bottle of absinthe with him. The absinthe causes the surly magpie to have well rendered hallucinations and eventually second thoughts about his relationships with others. A cryptic message at the end of the book states simply, “The Magpie will return.” I hope so; he’s an interesting character in a curious setting. Frey also has an email address for contact: darkwaterfrey@yahoo.com.
That’s it for this week. Next week, I’ll try to finish up with the books and mini-comics that floated to the top of the SPX pile. It’s really not fair, considering that I don’t consider anything from SPX to be a clunker. At MoCCA, there were a few books and comics that didn’t work that well for me, but so far I’ve been impressed and overjoyed with everything I’ve read from SPX.
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April 22, 2008:
February 4, 2008:
November 20, 2006:
A Comic-Con without the Captain
