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ndered and painted clothes to the next strip where she tapes up her breasts in order to elevate them a bit even though the way she draws her eyes and mouth are deliberately simple it doesn t mean that they re not expressive indeed in this strip her narrowed eyes and frown carry the storytelling day much of the comic centers around her being alone finding ways to engage herself while dealing with many emotions and mental states there s a page where she lines up all of her medications and forces a cheesy grin while crying that use of an open format is especially revealing when she draws herself flitting from place to place in her apartment throughout the day trying to keep busy there s a sort of divine and colorful clutter in her apartment that makes these strips stand out from those with just white backgrounds booth wants to be understood as part of the context clues her surroundings evoke as well as the way her apartment makes her feel secure as she loosens up in the book booth draws more gag strips like getting sunburned on the beach turning her apartment into a disaster prepper s stronghold and feeling coins fall out of her thighs after going bottomless in her apartment that s a hilarious and embarrassing image but booth has a way of killing shame in her work and making it just one more quotidian detail to absorb and laugh at booth s take on sex and her own sexuality is as funny as the rest of the book there s a strip where she squats over a mirror solemnly considering her own genitalia another strip finds her on her period as she angrily eats an entire bag of cheetos getting her mouth stained in orange powder while working on a journal called feelings later she experiences an equal amount of stress when she s extremely late for her period and swallows a whole packet of birth control pills booth switches from silly pulling out every sock from her dresser unable to find a match to funny buying a bunch of pointless stuff online while high to the deeply poignant and absurd constructing her own bedmate boyfriend out of a pool noodle paper plate and discarded clothes as i ve noted before the essential sweetness in these strips ties into her willingness to confront issues that are hidden or couched in terms of shame on the saddest and happiness of strips booth forgives and celebrates herself she allows herself to be human and to be alive and it s that self affirmation that acknowledges the title and shines on every scrawled but carefully assembled page posted by rob clough at 5 00 am no comments labels tara booth wednesday august 29 2018 glynnis fawkes alle ego glynnis fawkes mini alle ego is the middle chapter of a longer work about becoming an archeological illlustrator but it s also a story about personal agency as the book begins fawkes at the time a recent college grad is on her way to athens pondering her relationship with her fiance the trip was a working one at the american school but fawkes wandering eye and feet led her off on the first of her many side adventures when she arrived she quickly met svetlana a russian woman whose strong personality and fierce independence combined with great empathy and perceptiveness made her a close friend right away in many respects svet served as her own personal greek chorus causing fawkes to rethink a number of her choices without directly trying to influence her the comic is a cross between absolutely academic rigor with regard to places people and dates and a whimsically fluid series of fantasy sequences where fawkes sees herself in the past the key sequence is one where fawkes tells svet that her fiance ingo has a hold on me in the fantasy she s a minoan in occupied knossos and her fiance is a conquering mycenean the mycenean way was not just to conquer an area but to utterly dominate them culturally starting with their iconography on the pottery and sculptures the pictorial ornate minoan drawings were out and the abstract mycenean methods were in this is all historically true but it also served as an extended metaphor for a man who basically told fawkes what to do how to paint what to eat everything it isn t stated but this behavior is clearly abusive and controlling now there are dominance and submission relationships where the dom dictates a number of things but that s done within the specific and understood rules of the relationship as a mutual and loving exchange not as a one sided way of controlling your partner s every move fawkes who is clearly an intelligent and independent woman hints about this to some degree when she notes that in her fantasy i don t mind mycenean domination in fact it s what i ve been waiting for my whole life clear rules about how things are done no more self doubt and he cares about me intentional or not this is very much the language of a sub of someone who longs to enjoy that paradoxical sense of freedom felt when surrendering to a trusted other it s the agency of choosing to give that control to others that sense of agency pervades the comic as fawkes is paradoxically a rebel who doesn t want to go along with all of the touristy stuff and stereotypical nights out with the other americans at the bars but at the same fantasizes about that sense of total willing surrender she relates a story of when she was younger and in italy having drunk something particularly potent she went outside for air and the numerous lecherous men in italy immediately started hitting on her and one started making out with her but she found herself totally drawn into the experience before a friend came along and rescued her from a potentially dangerous fate fawkes once again returns to mythology and speaks longingly of the idea of being a maenad one of the followers of dionysus whom in the context of ritual are completely uninhibited in terms of raving running drinking and presumably fucking as she explained this to svet she wondered which part of her was going to be with her fiance the maenad or the sane and decent nymph to which svet replied aren t you always both it s a fascinating and open ended exchange as fawkes makes herself quite vulnerable here in discussing the ways in which her desires contradicted her rational self and fiercely independent academic identity svet s reply implies that until fawkes was able to reconcile all of her different selves she wouldn t truly be happy the very title of the book can mean both good friend and other self svet fills the bill for both of these roles but fawkes being honest about her desires and sense of feeling split also refers to her various other selves this comic and chapter feels like a kind of crucible of self where fawkes did a lot of the hard work on her discovery quest but didn t quite put it all together yet i ll be curious to see how these themes conclude when she finishes her larger project posted by rob clough at 3 00 am no comments labels glynnis fawkes monday august 27 2018 two minis from adam meuse adam meuse is slowly but surely starting to get more attention for his funny clever and often poignant mini comics his recent comic ball of shit has an obviously startlingly scatological title but the comic itself is actually quite thoughtful and philosophical it takes the literal action of a man rolling a ball of shit on a beach and pondering what he s doing and connects it to egyptian mythology and their obsession with scarab beetles the scarab rolls balls of its dung and their creation god similarly rolled the sun across the sky on a more literal basis scarab dung contains scarab eggs which hatch and eat the dung before emerging meuse then ties this back around to the man rolling the ball on the beach as the hope is to clean the environment and for new life to emerge it s a remarkably visceral little comic printed on thick card stock with approximately 3 x 3 dimensions it alternates image and text on facing pages and creates a rhythm that doesn t flinch from talking about shit and waste in general as things that must be confronted understood and even embraced meuse doesn t overreach here in terms of his philosophical territory indeed the simplicity of his drawing style and the comic s title are designed to keep pretension to a minimum that said this fits into his larger project of connecting our most basic belief systems with the biological factors that underlie them even if those factors are not always taken into account in other words meuse posits that there is no such thing as abstract thought and that those who think otherwise are kidding themselves this is not to say that conceptual beauty and thought don t exist but rather that their agents are always and inevitably embodied faults is a collection of loosely connected gag strips some of them aren t even gags like his account of the karl čapek play rossum s universal robots which is less about robots as machines than as workers that were exploited because it was assumed they had no souls meuse uses an angry red for this color immediately following that was a gag regarding the price ballerinas have to pay for dancing in terms of disfigured feet but in this case her foot was that of a reptile and the guy in the strip says uh you re a lizard person with the last panel featuring a long forked tongue flick into view there s a strip about fried potatoes which is funny but also reveals a great deal of thought that went into it there are some dark strips about red blood cells complaining about traffic until it lightens a bit only to reveal a person who s slit their wrists in the final panel there s also a truly grisly dudley do right parody where nell fenwick doesn t quite escape from being tied to a log though a nimble draftsman meuse s experiments with color always fascinate me he uses them for geological purposes in drawing different kinds of faults i e connected to earthquakes until the last panel reverts to the more familiar meaning of the word fault this mini is a good introduction to his work overall because it s hard to pin him down he does strips that depend on old cultural references whimsical studies about food autobiographical observations and memories strips featuring insects animals and microbes completely silly nonsense and comics as poetry meuse is simultaneously ambitious and probing as a cartoonist and yet completely unpretentious he s willing to experiment formally but never for the mere sake of experimentation meuse looks at concepts and images with the same lens as he s fastidious with his drawings qua drawings yet never goes completely abstract indeed exploring the shape of things and thinking about familiar shapes in new funny ways goes to the heart of his project as an artist his greatest skill is his ability to understand what formal approach works best with what idea be it color shape line weight or use of negative space the result is one where concept and drawing complement each other well posted by rob clough at 3 00 am no comments labels adam meuse friday august 17 2018 first second drew weing s margo maloo 2 the monster mall i was happy to see drew weing s margo maloo series get a second volume with first second not every good book published there has seen sequels the high concept for the book was established after the first volume a pre teen blogger and kids rights activist named charles moves to echo city and soon learns that there s a monster in his ancient building he is connected to monster mediator margo maloo who helps him with his problem and then decides to take him on as an intern in exchange for his willingness to share information with kids and only other kids that set the status quo for solving monster related problems as well as discovering the hidden monster society of echo city the second volume starts to hint at the past of margo herself a rare south asian protagonist in kids lit interestingly enough the book credits weing s wife and occasional collaborator eleanor davis with co creating her the reader gets to see her home a gloomy mansion slightly reminiscent of dr strange s sanctum sanctorum we meet her uncle vikram a beloved relative who is slipping into dementia we see her massive case files at the end of the book we get a hint at how she started doing this one or both of her parents acted as monster mediators and she apparently took over the job when they died or disappeared her tough exterior covers up anxiety about keeping up the code that separates monsters from humans as closed off as she is charles is an open book he quickly warms to the idea of the world of monsters sometimes disobeying margo when she tells him to stay back is game for margo telling him to do nearly anything and is warm and friendly with his friend kevin and the ogre who threatened to eat him in an misunderstanding in the first book he s earnest and inquisitive only wanting to empower kids the two stories in this edition involve a creature in a shiny new suburban home playing pranks on two children this effectively served to set up a new supporting character an imp named fyo this speaks to one of weing s strengths organically using sturdy plot devices and story tropes to slowly expand the cast of a wide ranging series the second story involves a group of teen vampires hiding out in an abandoned mall having to deal with a bunch of humans invading their space in both stories weing introduces an amusing plot swerve in the latter the humans turn out to be a goth band looking to shoot a video and the vampires themselves have a fledgling band of their own but he also carefully lays down some storytelling pipe for the future weing doesn t go too far into the metaphorical aspects of the story but they re there if you look for them regarding a group having to keep itself hidden and secret in order to maintain its safety the book is formatted landscape style which suits weing s roots in webcomics as well as his interest in classic comic strips as i ve noted before if this was fifty years ago weing would be a syndicated cartoonist with a daily strip most of the comic was done by hand and it shows in the spontaneity of the drawings combined with his usual skill as a draftsman character design in particular is his biggest strength charles looks like a comic book character the big eyes ballcap collared short sleeve shirt slightly tubby shape so does margo the sharply feathered hair the billowing coat the graceful body language and movements charles is all curves and margo is all angles and they look great interacting with each other the use of color feels natural and basic weing isn t looking to overwhelm the page with color and is much more interested in the figures on his page for a book about monsters weing has a way of keeping things fairly low key while still dropping bread crumbs of more menacing events down the line posted by rob clough at 3 00 am no comments labels drew weing wednesday august 15 2018 nobrow hilda and the hidden people hilda and the hidden people is not a new book by series creator luke pearson it is instead an illustrat...