Drowning in Youthful, Vulnerable Romance: Fred McNamara reviews HAZE by Rosie Haghighi

The pleasant, comforting glow of Haze perfectly captures its swooning, playful nature. Bolstered by her sizzling art, Rosie Haghighi crafts a romantically sumptuous tale of love caught in emotional entanglement. Haze fuses together a variety of disparate elements, ones that occasionally have difficulty talking to each other. Yet Haghighi is able to unify these elements together via a pair of intriguing protagonists, whose teasing romance gives Haze a fluid, bobbing feel.

When reading through Haze, the most apparent thing is the blending of shape and color. The romantically entwined protagonists, Wade and Finn, are two high school students with a shared passion for swimming. The comic begins and ends with scenes involving the two boys in water, either in an ocean, in a swimming pool, or a bath. Complimenting this focus on water, Haghighi’s sketchy penciling blends landscapes and atmospheres, create a pleasantly loose, liquid tone throughout the book. 

This use of water as a central theme acts as a reflection of the seemingly fluid nature of Wade and Finn’s relationship. Haze captures their relationship as not being set in stone. Instead, it’s shown as being in motion, traversing from the pair half-acknowledging their feelings for each other to, later, relinquishing the pretense of pretending and admitting their desire to become a couple. The climactic actions in the comic’s final few pages that enable the pair to be together act almost as a dam bursting, a wave of emotions pouring out.

Countering this fluidity is the comic’s panel structure. Often, the characters and their actions are condensed into compact panels which gives the otherwise free-wheeling feel of Haze a welcome sense of confinement. Panels large and small still make room for Haghighi’s swirling art, whose gorgeous, rippling nature comes into contact with everything and everyone featured in Haze, fashioning a cohesive visual voice.

Fractured love is the other chief theme of Haze, and this provides a darker, more stern alternative to the otherwise playful attitudes Finn and Wade have for each other. In contrast to Haze’s emphasis on color and shape, the dialogue in the comic is minimal and vague. Fortunately, Haghighi flexes her narrative muscles in these moments and what precious little dialogue there is does a great deal in telegraphing not only the disconnect between Wade and Finn but also their desire to reconnect. 

The actual story of the comic is equally fragmented. Haze’s narrative is less of a complete story, and more of a series of interlinked scenes, snapshots of a relationship that has withered to some extent but eventually blossoms into something more unified. The pacing feels rough, the scenes occasionally bolted on, but the payoff is well received. The aforementioned skeletal use of dialogue ends up complimenting this narrative structure well. These loosely connected scenes aren’t cluttered by clumps of dialogue and action. Haze’s brief page run reflects Haghighi’s ambition, opting to portray a relationship neither at the beginning or the end, but rather, caught in the middle.

Bonding these scattershot scenes together is Haghighi’s supremely warm artwork. The colors, chiefly composed of a red and blue palette, bear an almost nostalgic quality, the warmth exuding from the pages rise like the temperature on a hot summer’s day, inviting the reader in. There’s a great emphasis on colors as a communicator of emotion

Haghighi primarily uses reds to shade in the characters and blues to illustrate nearly everything else. The shades of red that illuminate Wade and Finn highlight their warmth for each other and the romantic tension between the pair. It’s a subtle bit of business that underscores the tenor of their relationship. Haghighi also expertly uses a colder shade of blue to indicate a series of hallucinogenic flashbacks Wade experiences throughout the comic to rosier days spent in Finn’s arms. This darker blue emphasizes the coldness Wade feels, isolated from Finn and his initial lack of confidence regarding how to amend their relationship.

The story itself buckles somewhat in Haze’s climactic scenes. Throughout the comic, Wade’s flashbacks increase in their severity, culminating in the comic’s final, action-packed scene. The decisive moment in Haze that brings the two back together comes when Wade believes he sees Finn diving into a stormy ocean during a beach party and dives in after him. Seeing Wade make a seemingly odd venture into the sea, Finn pursues him, eventually rescuing Wade from drowning. 

It’s a sweet scene that breaks down the emotional barriers the pair have created against each other earlier in the story, but it’s communicated in a jarring manner. There’s no hint given that what Wade witnesses is nothing more than a false vision. The ensuing drama that swells from the duo diving in to rescue one another is nimble and heartfelt, it’s just that Wade’s triggering of these events feels rushed and jumbled. This perhaps highlights the weaker points of Haze’s brief, scattershot structure and suggests how scenes such as these would benefit from a longer length to allow such scenes to breathe.

Still, in Haze, Wade and Finn serve as the glue that binds all of these intricate elements together. Haghighi portrays them as an empathetic, flirtatious pair, yet hardwired with youthful vulnerability. The fondness they have for each other is juxtaposed by a seemingly self-imposed distance. It’s as if their eventual succumbing to each other marks a leap of maturity for them, with Finn telling Wade to cease with the disingenuous, casual flirting and become more open, more direct, more truthful in his feelings. 

Despite some jagged narrative delivery scuppering its emotional weight, Haze is an evocative, endlessly charming affair. It’s a comic who’s appeal lies in how it shows high emotions through sharp, precise art. Story and art grow around each other with effortless care and attention to detail, and Haghighi’s depiction of a torn love that manages to rectify itself bolsters its value. Haze is an enchanting comic who’s emotionally tuned-in state makes for satisfying reading.

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Fred McNamara thoroughly enjoys writing about comic books and TV shows you've never heard of. His love of indie/small press comics arose through his role as senior editor for the superhero/comic book hub A Place To Hang Your Cape. He's currently enduring a prolonged period of sleepless nights as his debut book, Spectrum is Indestructible, is gearing up for publication later this year from Chinbeard Books.

In the Shadow of the Apocalypse: Fred McNamara reviews WE HAVE TO GO BACK by Jordan Alsaqa and Sally Cantirino

The emotional fallout of an apocalyptic event is a tried and tested formula in character-driven storytelling. The urgency of the disastrous situation flings characters into emotional turmoil, at times forcing them to come to terms with their own mortality. It’s refreshing, then, to find that Jordan Alsaqa and Sally Cantirino take the apocalyptic narrative a step further with We Have To Go Back. This is a comic who’s story is driven by an undisclosed disaster, but it’s not about the disaster at all. Such is the level of detachment We Have To Go Back has to its own propulsive event, i.e. the specifics about what exactly has happened that displaces Jo and Katie from their lonely town to the neighboring desolate woodland.

Instead, the story is about the unplugging and reconnecting of Jo and Katie’s romantic relationship. Across the comic’s brief 39 pages, Alsaqa’s story takes the reader across the ebb and flow of We Have To Go Back’s emotional current. The story is split between two points in Katie and Jo’s relationship, with the bulk of the story placed during the pair’s fractured, tumultuous time in the woodland, post-disaster. The other half of the comic takes place prior, positioning Jo and Katie’s relationship in happier times. 

The dialogue and character traits Alsaqa constructs for Jo and Katie work to form a time frame of their relationship. In the flashback segments, their relationship is just blossoming, with the pair growing used to each other’s quirks and lifestyles. In the present-day segments, on the other hand, their relationship feels aged, weary, exhausted from living their day-to-day existence. It’s as if the passage of time weighs upon their shoulders, to the point where their relationship is starting to crack. This push and pull of emotional states in Jo and Katie’s lives gives We Have To Go Back a tense rhythm. 

Cantirino’s artwork illuminates these contrasting moods effortlessly. Produced in a newsprint-esque fashion, her black-and-white linework carries the stark immediacy of the story. She captures the torn nature of Katie and Jo’s relationship by often drawing them separate from each other, either because of their bouts of sparring or separated because of the panel structure. It’s a powerful visual nod towards the damaged attitude Katie and Jo have for their relationship, how it has dissolved into an antagonistic affair, as Katie becomes fixated on returning to their desolate town while Jo wants to remain within the confines of the safety of their makeshift home.

What’s harder to pin down is the nature of the incident that triggers the breakdown of Jo and Katie’s lives. As previously mentioned, the incident itself is minimal compared to the real focus of the comic, yet is that a justifiable excuse for not giving the disaster a tangible sense of scale? Such is the skeletal amount of information presented to the reader regarding the disaster itself, so much so that it becomes awkward to try to give it a sense of its enormity. It throws the comic into a tonal limbo that’s salvaged only by that lack of information, delivering a haunting, unknown edge to the disaster.

Still, We Have To Go Back’s focus is firmly on its characters, and it never loses sight of that. Cantirino and Alsaqa fuse their skills together in the comic’s final arc when Jo finally agrees to allow Katie to return to their town in search of supplies. As Katie departs, Jo experiences an epiphany that rescues their relationship; she realizes that Katie’s encouragement for her to stray from her comfort zone has been a key factor in their relationship. This revelation is the culmination of the comic’s zig-zagging narrative construct, and Katie and Jo slip back into each other’s arms via Cantirino’s connective art, which, here, finally shows the duo closer together in the same panels. It’s a reflection of their loving nature for each other and for the rescuing of their relationship. 

It’s quite creatively satisfying to see an artist and writer work in tandem like this to ensure that the story and the characters they’re creating are delivered with as much of an emotional impact as Cantirino and Alsaqa have here. So often in the comic’s interior pages, writer, artist, letter, etc distinguish their roles as such. Yet with We Have To Go Back, the duo credit themselves as joint creators. The cohesion in the comic’s intertwined visuals and narrative is a testament to that.

We Have To Go Back is a tense, unfolding read, bolstered by intricate artwork and in-tune moods from its characters. Alsaqa’s empathetic characterization and meticulously constructed, character-driven story ensure that the reader pays heed to Katie and Jo’s clashing frames of mind. Cantirino’s art relays the subtle intensity of Katie and Jo’s situation well, but it is delicate enough to convey the more intimate moments of the story. Cantirino proves she’s equally effective in sketching out barren, open landscapes that mirror both the distance Jo and Katie have for each other and the uneasy nature of the disaster that throws the pair out of their comfort zones.

We Have To Go Back is less of a story and more of an in-depth testing of the romance between its central characters. That level of focus on the comic’s players, the unresolved nature of the apocalypse that kickstarts the story, and the minute number of characters itself require a skilled set of hands to make sure We Have To Go Back hits all the right emotional beats. Alsaqa and Cantirino, coupled with editor Danny Lore, deliver a bare, heartfelt tale of the survival of love in the shadow of a threat larger than life itself. 

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Fred McNamara thoroughly enjoys writing about comic books and TV shows you've never heard of. His love of indie/small press comics arose through his role as senior editor for the superhero/comic book hub A Place To Hang Your Cape. He's currently enduring a prolonged period of sleepless nights as his debut book, Spectrum is Indestructible, is gearing up for publication later this year from Chinbeard Books.

The Ephemeral Comfort Of Their Elders: Sara L. Jewell reviews GONZALO by Jed McGowan

Set against the hellish post-apocalyptic backdrop of a decimated future California, Jed McGowan’s Shortbox comic Gonzalo follows an aging robotic bear who has been “several decades in the field” and her young flesh-and-blood cub, now nearly grown. The robot has been tasked with caring for the young animal by humans who are likely long dead: their conservationism aimed at protecting a single bear seems in retrospect a humorously small and pitiful effort foregrounded by the surrounding environmental collapse – burned forests due to drought, cities gone dark. McGowan’s grainy color palette gives the impression of air that is never completely clear of smoke, and the California drought is the implied result of human-instigated climate change. The pair of grizzlies make their way across a fraught and hostile landscape with no particular destination or goal in mind other than immediate survival. Behind this more personal story, however, is McGowan’s exploration of the human tendency to take destructive advantage of that which nurtures and sustains us, and the way in which this plays into the relationship between mothers and their children. McGowan skillfully sets up a story that interrogates how human nature has fueled the decidedly unnatural phenomenon of climate change, and how the dissolutive sacrifices of the story’s central matriarch mirror the decline of the earth itself. 

Primarily through modeling behavior, the narrator, whom will hereafter be referred to as “RB” or “Robot Bear”, takes on the role of Gonzalo’s mother, utilizing the information stored in her secondary computer to show Gonzalo how to be a grizzly. And make no mistake, Gonzalo is first and foremost a book about motherhood and its sacrifices, though there is a certain irony in Gonzalo being instructed in “real” bearhood by an ersatz bear. RB may look like an animal, but her narrative voice is often very human. 

Despite, or perhaps because of, her human-made consciousness, RB guides Gonzalo with genuine love and devotion. Like any parent, she constantly questions her choices: has she allowed Gonzalo to stay with her for too long, stymieing his independence?  Has he become too reliant on her guidance to find food and water or to avoid danger? Also, like any parent, RB increasingly finds the information in her secondary computer to be antiquated or obsolete. Built by humans who lived in a world that no longer resembles the one laid out before her, the secondary computer cannot offer foolproof data. As they search for water, she follows her internal map to a stream that has dried out.

A profoundly changed topography has rendered the data she has for navigating the world outdated and sometimes useless. To be a bear in this world means something new and different than it once did, as to be an adult changes with each subsequent human generation. Humans, once invested deeply in Gonzalo’s survival - by evidence of RB’s existence - are now a threat to his life, concerned only with their own. “Our human predators hunted us most often during the day,” RB laments. As she observes when they avoid highways: “cars had become rare, but humans still stuck to paved roads…familiar pathways.” But the “familiar pathways” in RB’s secondary computer are not always reliably familiar - she and Gonzalo must forge new pathways to find the evasive resources Gonzalo requires to survive.

Even so, RB keeps a sharp eye out for opportunities to both nourish Gonzalo and show him what to do when she’s gone so that he can take care of himself. The pair come upon a pack of coyotes feeding on a fresh kill. To take their prey, RB roars, attempting to teach Gonzalo that intimidation can sometimes be enough to overcome an adversary. 

However, these coyotes are desperate, and one attacks RB. RB feels “remorse” for killing the coyotes because as there is metal and not flesh beneath her pelt, she has an advantage over them which is “not fair”. This is an interesting parallel to the technological advantages humans often have over animals that enable them to overhunt, overfish, and over strip land, but also to cause the devastating climate change that has wracked the landscape and ultimately made it unfit to support life. RB’s single-minded focus on caring for Gonzalo echoes a human self-interest that puts itself and its children first, no matter the consequences.

RB and Gonzalo are both facing up to their own mortality. RB, though a robot, is soon likely to experience critical system failure as she has been without maintenance for many years. And in all their searches, they have not found a mate for Gonzalo, who RB muses may be “the last grizzly in California”.

RB’s consciousness considers more than terrestrial matters. She also contemplates her own existence, turning her eyes to the stars, now brightly visible and unobscured by city light pollution. She narrates the familiar mythological story of Arcas and Callisto. Callisto, a nymph, carries on an affair with Jupiter, king of the Gods, and bears a son, Arcas. Jupiter’s wife Juno, angered, transforms Callisto into a bear. Coming upon his mother while hunting in the forest, Arcas is about to kill her, but Jupiter quickly transforms him into a bear as well. The mother and son are immortalized in the sky, as the constellations Ursa Major and Minor. RB sees herself in Callisto, who was “both a bear and human,” meanwhile “I was a bear with a mind programmed to be like a human’s…but God hadn’t made me this way. The researchers had.”

Like Callisto, RB is willing to make the ultimate sacrifice to protect Gonzalo, confirming for the reader her deep maternal attachment to Gonzalo which goes beyond her programmed, prescribed role in assisting grizzly conservation. When RB and Gonzalo become separated after fighting the coyotes, she encounters two humans – and father and son – and two competing directives: protect Gonzalo, but do not approach humans. RB doesn’t hesitate to proceed towards the hostile human pair. She remarks that they are “no longer predators”  - no longer at the top of the food chain – and that the tables have turned, and “They had the startled look of prey about to be eaten.” Wrenchingly, RB must use the same roar she used to try and intimidate the coyotes earlier in the story to scare Gonzalo away from her and thus save him; “I had done all I could for Gonzalo. I had done too much.” She violates another directive, biting down hard on a human’s leg so he cannot pursue Gonzalo. The admission that she has “done too much” suggests that RB’s having remained with Gonzalo for longer than a natural grizzly mother would is due to a selfish, human impulse to remain with her son for as long as possible. Her scientific attachment to him has irrefutably transformed into human maternal love, and she has been loathe to leave him. 

Unaware that RB is made of metal and thus cannot provide meat, the human pair crow that they will “eat for a week” after killing her. Like the selfless Giving Tree (perhaps referenced by the spectral tree on the comic’s back cover), RB hopes that the humans will nonetheless take her pelt for warmth as she fades into darkness. Her last thoughts are of Gonzalo.

As a book about the sacrifices of motherhood, Gonzalo also cautions against taking mothers for granted, against believing that they will always be there to nurture and protect us. In doing so, it is also about how we have taken “Mother Earth” for granted, believing that she will always provide for us no matter what iniquities she suffers from human hands. If we shortsightedly depredate the earth to enjoy ease and convenience in the here and now, there will be little left later to sustain our children and grandchildren, or anything else living. However, Gonzalo’s opening lines offer a message of hope, as they describe RB breaking open a burnt tree to reveal ants for Gonzalo to eat: “There was life,” she thinks “within this dead tree.” This hope, that life will out, is couched in RB’s forward-looking, parental love for her young charge, which, in her sacrifice, rejects trading young people’s futures for the ephemeral comfort of their elders. 

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Sara L. Jewell is a freelance writer, artist, comic creator, and educator based in New Jersey. You can find her at saraljewell.com or rambling on twitter @1_saraluna. All email inquiries can be sent to 

saraljewell@gmail.com

The Full Spectrum of a Complicated Situation: Rob Kirby reviews A FIRE STORY by Brian Fies

Just after 1 a.m. on October 9th, 2017, cartoonist Brian Fies and his wife Karen woke to a nightmare: the wildfires that had been raging throughout Northern California had reached the vicinity of their home in Santa Rosa, heralded by a power outage, the smell of smoke, and an ominous orange glow in the sky. They grabbed their pets, some clothes, and a few other items, and headed for refuge a few miles away, fully expecting to return very soon. But by late morning they discovered that their house and entire neighborhood had been completely destroyed, incinerated in a literal firestorm. Fies was existentially dumbstruck: “Everything we owned now fit into the back half of a Prius.”  

A die-hard cartoonist, Fies immediately acquired a cheap pad of paper, a permanent marker, a felt-tip pen, and some highlighters, and began writing and drawing comics about the fire. He calls it “bearing witness,” but it becomes clear early on that drawing his experience of this maelstrom was also therapeutic. 

Fies produced 18 pages in four days. He posted them online and they went viral, covered by many major media outlets. He later expanded upon these early pages and the result is A Fire Story — a scary, sobering, and thought-provoking memoir, infused nonetheless with a can-do sense of optimism and hope. 

Though the first 25 pages of A Fire Story give a vivid description of the disaster, the bulk of the story focuses on the aftermath: the steady drip of logistical, financial and emotional trials with which Fies and other survivors are faced - the scramble to locate temporary living quarters and procure basic necessities (“underwear, socks, shoes, bottled water, toothbrush and toothpaste, one light shirt, one heavy shirt”); salvaging, relocating and/or rebuilding; and, above all, coping with the devastating personal and communal sense of loss and grief. We learn that the catastrophe killed 44 people and destroyed about 8,900 structures, including over 6,200 homes, in eight counties. In this unforgiving new reality simply surviving the day-to-day becomes crucial.

Fies acknowledges that he and his family have enough resources to weather the worst material losses and can rebuild their home; expanding the story’s scope beyond his circumstances, he smartly includes 2- and 3-page illustrated oral histories of other victims, some of whom are not as fortunate as he. One elderly woman named Dottie, whose trailer was destroyed, convincingly describes her post-fire housing issues as “hell” (unsurprisingly, the word hell pops up a lot here). These mini-narratives add to the book’s somewhat scrapbook structure, with different chapters addressing various facets of the situation, many filled with almost anthropological detail. With such an encompassing and overwhelming event, this feels like a smart approach. 

In some of the best sequences, Fies describes attempts to salvage items from the ruins of his house and cope with numbingly rote insurance protocols. In one bitterly funny, instantly relatable sequence, he phones a utilities agent to cancel his former home’s electricity and gas accounts. The agency has a list of questions that they are required to ask every customer, and Fies has to reiterate that there are no fences or gates blocking the electric meter (“The entire neighborhood burned to the ground”) and that yes, workers will have clear access to the gas meter (“Unlimited access, but there’s no gas meter there anymore.”). When Fies’ auto-insurance provider asks if the photos Fies has of his “totally totaled” car show the license plate or vehicle I.D. number, Fies, looking completely worn down, tells them, “No, those melted.” It’s all a perfect parody of bureaucratic rigmarole …except that it is real.   

In another section of A Fire Story, Fies vividly describes a process that has become depressingly familiar in the wake of other catastrophes such as Hurricane Katrina, where unscrupulous developers see nothing but financial opportunity after a devastating tragedy, often working with politicians to displace lower-income people to build high-priced housing. I would have loved for Fies to have spent more pages on this subject, as it could make for a book in itself (in the meantime I’d recommend Peter Moskowitz’s 2017 non-fiction tome How to Kill a City: Gentrification, Inequality and the Fight for the Neighborhood, specifically the section discussing New Orleans). But Fies, ever the optimist, balances tales of these rotten people with examples of the kindness and support he and the community received from many quarters—including thousands of complete strangers—who lent financial and practical help. While Fies is admittedly blessed with the relative privilege to report on the positive as well as the negative, this comes across as a sincere effort to offer the full spectrum of a complicated situation, rather than sugar-coating.  

In between longer chapters Fies sprinkles episodes from his one-page, four-panel comic strip, “A Day in the New Life,” which portrays quotidian moments of old routines and habits brushing up against the post-fire reality. In my favorite installment, Fies heads toward the kitchen of their temporary digs, brightly telling Karen he’s going to make a pitcher of iced tea. Engrossed in reading a newspaper, she replies, “Sounds good.” The next two silent panels show Karen silently reading the paper. In the final panel, Fies returns empty-handed. Fies: “No pitcher.” Karen: “Put it on the list.” These quiet strips act as a nice breather between the more fraught sections, adding a soothing texture of the everyday into the mix, as well as highlighting Fies’ Schulz-like comic timing. 

Fies, who won an Eisner Award for his 2009 graphic novel Mom’s Cancer, has his roots in the comics mainstream and that’s obvious from the get-go. While his bright, cartoony drawings for A Fire Story are polished, allowing readers a smooth trajectory throughout the narrative, his style features little that is idiosyncratic or memorable. For me, his work is professional almost to a fault; I actually quite prefer his original strips (included in their entirety in the Afterword), which by their very in-the-moment nature display a looser, more urgent quality. Despite my preferences, his slick style will likely broaden the appeal of A Fire Story to a larger audience, as his clean lines and bright color palate provide an upbeat spin to grim events (I can only imagine how dark this story might have come across in the hands of a moodier cartoonist, such as Gabby Schultz or James Romberger). I finished the book wishing Fies the best of luck with his rebuilding efforts and admiring not only his storytelling chops but his bravery and fortitude in fashioning a new life from (literal) ashes. 

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Rob Kirby is a cartoonist, editor, and writer who lives in Minneapolis. He is the author of Curbside Boys and editor/creator of anthologies such as the Ignatz Award-winning QU33R, the Ignatz-nominated series THREE, What’s Your Sign, Girl? Cartoonists Talk About Their Sun Signs, and The Shirley Jackson Project: Comics About Her Life and Work. He also writes for TCJ.com, Publishers Weekly, and other venues. Rob is currently at work on the graphic memoir Marry Me a Little. 

They Really Do Say So Much: Ryan Carey reviews ALL THE SAD SONGS by Summer Pierre

The connective tissue linking music and memory is very strong indeed --- most of us can remember fairly clearly where we were and/or what we were doing the first time we heard a favorite song; hearing one we haven't heard in years often takes us right back to what was going on in our lives during the period when it was in heavy rotation; feelings attach themselves to songs permanently, inflexibly, the record in question causing at the very least faint echoes of the same particular mood or frame of mind again and again and again.

But there's a lot more to it than "that song always cheers me up" or "oh my God, this one  makes me think of  (insert former lover's name)!" Melody and memory are so inextricably entwined that Alzheimer's and dementia patients often respond to songs from their younger years while words and even tactile sensations have no effect on them. The union of the two is so powerful, in fact, that it might even be argued to be primal in nature --- so the idea that a cartoonist would tell the story of her or his life (or a part of it, at any rate) by means of musically-anchored reminiscences seems like a natural. And there's probably no one better qualified to make such a conceit work than Summer Pierre.

The auteur behind Paper Pencil Life hails from a musically-rich family background and is no stranger to singing, songwriting, and guitar-playing herself, but her own personal musical journey isn't precisely what her 2018 debut full-length graphic novel, the Retrofit/Big Planet-published  All The Sad Songs, is about. Rather, it's about how music has shaped her life on the one hand, how her life has shaped her shifting taste in, and relationship to, music on the other --- and how the two have become symbiotic halves that make up the whole of her identity and existence.

Put like that it probably sounds more grandiose than Pierre ever intended it to be, but this is truly an ambitious and innovative graphic memoir about her life in the early 1990s, a period that saw her move from California to Boston, follow her musical inclinations into the city's open mic "scene," and subsequently attempt to navigate her way through a series of interpersonal relationships that largely sprung from it. Nothing, perhaps, terribly ground-breaking on paper, but it is the method that is key here.

It's not only her own music that informs these proceedings, you see, far from it : Pierre also affixes events in time in around albums that were contemporary with them and, even more interestingly, she extracts rich veins of memory from the mixtapes that she made for people she knew (for you youngsters out there this is how we used to do it in the days before slapping together a playlist for someone --- it took hours and was often a genuine labor of love) and the ones that they, in turn, made for her. She has many of these tapes to this day and literally remembers people through music, while also remembering songs in relation to the people who introduced them to her.

I made brief mention of the relationships Pierre forged while part of the Boston folk milieu, and much of this book's dramatic tension stems from the fact that, it has to be said, not all of them were entirely healthy --- and it's one particularly tumultuous one that not only leaves her suffering from PTSD but re-evaluating her relationship with music altogether, eventually setting her on an entirely different path of creative expression. There's a wistful tone to this work on the whole, as one would expect given its subject matter and essential character, but this de facto "break-up" with something woven so deeply into the metaphorical "DNA" of her being --- hell, of her soul, if you prefer such a term --- borders on the harrowing, and whether or not she makes it through with a new, healthier perspective or ends up a shadow of her former self seems very much an open question for a time. It's probably not "spoiling" things to say that it all works out in the end, but it's a difficult and painful period that's communicated with admirable, even disarming, emotional honesty --- and keep in mind this is a comic that places readers pretty deep inside the cartoonist's mind and heart more or less from the outset! So, yeah, like all lovers worth remembering, music puts Pierre through the wringer.

Her new medium of choice is sure proving to be an inspired one for her, though, it must be said --- Pierre is one of those rare artists who use every last millimeter of space in every panel to communicate information visually, her detailed cross-hatching, thick black shading, and precise rendition of minor details forming a highly emotive backdrop for her naturalistic figure drawings, and the candor and unpretentiousness of her narrative tone is mirrored perfectly in the faces of her characters, each a truly singular individual with expressive reactions and mannerisms utterly unique unto them. Even the folks we meet briefly make an impression --- go ahead, say it, just like a lot of songs.

I'll be the first to admit that the fact I'm roughly the same age as Summer Pierre may go some way toward explaining why this book resonated so deeply, even indelibly, with me --- I remember these times, I was young then myself, and there's a character and ethos to the "slacker" or "Generation X" years that simply can't be communicated with any sort of authenticity by someone who wasn't a part of it. Yet All The Sad Songs knocked me for a loop not just for the overwhelming sense of nostalgia it engendered --- nope, I was (and remain) in awe of the work of one of the very best cartoonists in the here and now, one who is fully arriving into her own and knows how to make every one of her pages sing.

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Ryan Carey lives and works in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He writes about comics for Daily Grindhouse, Graphic Policy, and at his own blog. He also maintains a long-running film review blog, Trash Film Guru.

Enemies of the State #003 – The Song of Aglaia by Anne Simon

Enemies of the State is a monthly virtual book club discussion on a recently published comic, featuring a rotating cast of comics critics.

Episode #3 of Enemies of the State features commentary on Anne Simon’s The Song of Aglaia, published by Fantagraphics in 2018. The Song of Aglaia is the first major release of Simon’s work in the English-reading market; her comics have also appeared in the Fantagraphics anthology series NOW. Song of Aglaia features the oceanide Aglaia who develops a fierce hatred for men in a paternalistic society. Taking advantage of an opportunity, she overthrows a government and throws her life into chaos.

The cast for this episode includes the following critics:

• Daniel Elkin of Your Chicken Enemy
• Alex Hoffman of Sequential State
• Sarah Miller of The Sequentialist
• Ryan Carey of Four Color Apocalypse

Subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Google Podcasts, and other podcast apps or listen here and at Sound Cloud. If you are a comics critic and are interested in joining in on the show, please contact me using my contact form or through the email on my contact page. And of course, if you have any feedback, contact us!
We hope you enjoy the podcast!

Rob Clough reviews Six New Titles from GLOM PRESS

Glom Press is an exciting new publishing concern located in Melbourne, Australia. The people behind it are Marc Pearson and Michael Hawkins, both of whom are cartoonists in their own right.  They specialize in beautiful Risograph-printed comics, and a recent fundraising campaign produced a half-dozen strange and interesting books. It's hard to pin down their aesthetic as a publisher, other than they are clearly drawn to personal work that explores human empathy and alienation. The comics Glom publishes have a rough edge to them in terms of both storytelling and mark-making, creating an intense level of intimacy between creator and reader. However, the genres and approaches each artist adopts are radically different in some cases, making each book a unique experience. 

Eloise Grills' Sexy Female Murderesses is an example of a Glom artist choosing to focus on alienation mutating into completely antisocial behavior. Grills' use of an almost smeared dark green and purple in the comic makes the pages feel like bruises. Her fascination with the titular subject of the murderesses veers off into her own feelings and life, as she uses them to explore the ways in which women have historically snapped in the face of oppression and boredom. Grills is as interested in the history of people writing about this subject as she is in the women themselves, quoting several men with regard to women who murder. The quotes often mention women poisoning their victims (usually their families) and posits this as a preferred method because women lack the "courage, willpower and strength" to murder in other ways. These quotes are revelatory as they demean women even when it comes to such monstrous, immoral activities. 

Sexy Female Murderesses is a long, funny, and disturbing ramble on the subject that's not unlike the work of Jessica Campbell in terms of her expressive, smudgy line. Grills' personal tangents reveal that this is really a book about not only how she relates to the idea of feeling the need for control in her life but also about how the power of life and death over others -- especially innocents like children -- is the ultimate form of control. It's not just having power, but it's also the idea of flying in the face of everything that is expected of women in society. She relates dreams she's had about being Tonya Harding performing at the Olympics, knowing about the crime she's committed. There's that sense of being consumed by guilt but also understanding that women are ultimately judged for how they look and how they perform. Grills examines the perniciousness of the male gaze as not just objectifying in a reductive, sexual manner but actually forcing women to conform to this soulless, vapid, and dehumanizing gender construct. The rejection of this control, no matter how pathological it might be, is not celebrated by Grills because it is pathological. It is celebrated because it so clearly reveals the ways in which the deck is stacked against women.

Mandy Ord's Galápagos is an autobiographical story about her experience watching two different television shows: The Walking Dead and a David Attenborough documentary about life on the Galápagos Islands. Using a grotesque style for character design, this comic is about Ord's visceral reaction to a number of different things all at once. The grisly zombie violence of The Walking Dead has always represented a sort of exaggeration of society at large, and Ord started watching in spite of herself because of the possibility of resisting the zombies and killing them. That resistance was a denial of death itself, but it was also an affirmation of humanity coming together to resist extermination. When the show started to have humans kill other humans (the old "we were the real monsters all along!" trope), Ord found herself unable to watch. It was too much of a betrayal, and the visceral thrills she experienced were erased by being reminded of the horror that humanity perpetrates against itself. 

Of course, the Attenborough documentary features snakes devouring newborn iguanas, and the camera follows them devouring them like those zombies went after human brains. It triggers the same kind of reaction from Ord, who decides to go to bed. The final scenes depict her imagining snakes and zombies in her bed, a reminder not just of her own mortality but of the fragile nature of the social order in general. The green tone Ord uses for this comic is appropriate: a kind of sickly, unpleasant color that goes along with Ord's exaggerated, grotesque self-caricature.

Psychic Hotline, by Leonie Brialey, is perhaps the oddest entry in this idiosyncratic sextet of books from Glom Press. Consisting of a series of single-page images, it's also a quiet and melancholy story about trauma, depression, and connection. There are two primary characters: a ghostly and depressed figure frequently seen melting into his environment, and a woman working for the titular psychic hotline who talks to him on the phone. She explains that it's her "job to know the exact thing that is wrong with someone before they've even said anything" and then offer them advice without further triggering any trauma. The book is a series of conversations between the two of them, as well as the operator's own musings on her job. 

Brialey takes a minimalist approach and takes care to explore her line both in terms of pure mark-making as well as the emotional impact of each image. There are many zoom-ins and zoom-outs as part of page-long sequences, as well as a number of shots lingering on the ghost on page after page. Brialey here seems to want the reader to really remain in the ghost's sadness and feel that sense of desperation, even in the face of so much empathy and understanding.  Brialey's careful and almost agonizingly slow pacing goes hand in hand with the vast amount of negative space on each page. There's a sense in which any mark on the page is a kind of triumph against the void, just as reaching out and seeking help is its own kind of triumph. Human connection helps but doesn't fix everything, and it's telling that no matter how therapeutic her advice to the ghost is regarding their fractured relationship with their father, it is unclear if it ultimately helps. The final images are of the ghost just sort of going blank and becoming one with the earth.

Sometimes a comic is notable for what isn't said or seen but what is suggested. Such is the case with Rachel Ang's Swimsuit, a slice-of-life comic about a young woman who goes to a public pool with an ex-boyfriend. Everything about this comic is subtext, and Ang's expressive line that emphasizes shadow and the way bodies relate to each other in space serves to highlight hidden emotions and broken relationships. The woman, Jenny, is clearly interested in potentially getting back together with her ex, which Ang communicates by the way Jenny primps before he arrives. When he drops the bomb that he's dating someone new in the least sensitive and most oblivious way possible, one can see her entire mien sink into despair. Her shoulders slump, her arms are crossed, and it's clear that she starts to hate the way her body looks after her ex shows her a photo of his new girlfriend. The only way in which she reveals her feelings is when she says, "I didn't know that was your type" regarding the photo. He doesn't understand what she means by that and she feigns ignorance, but it's clear that she means "I wasn't your type."

Things only get worse from there. There's a moment of shocking violence when a bunch of white kids attack a black kid in the pool and pretend that he started it. Her ex looks on impassively, saying things like "I'm sure they're just playing" instead of acting. She damns herself for her own impassivity, mirroring the impassivity she evinces when she doesn't reveal her feelings. That's true even when he presses and asks if they're "cool", once again oblivious to the situation and her own feelings. When he finally gets the sense that this was a fucked-up situation and he half-heartedly apologizes that "it wasn't a nice time," he adds "I feel like whenever I'm around you, something heavy happens!" Jenny maintains that mix of rage and impassivity by half-jokingly saying "Yeah, I'm a fucking shit magnet!" and then walking away. It's a desolating moment of self-hatred and frustration. 

The final pages, when Jenny goes home, undresses, and then sinks into her bed, highlight her utter devastation. That sinking feeling is conveyed through Ang's use of color. Throughout most of the comic, Ang uses a dark purplish blue for her scratchy line, with the exception of the water in the pool. She uses a light green for those sequences, only the water isn't depicted as comforting. It looks oppressive and claustrophobic in its whorls. That same green appears at the end as she sinks into her bed, looking for comfort but finding only despair. Ang's use of narrative restraint, body language, and visual cues make this story deeply affecting. 

Aaron Billings' Mystical Boy Scout is the tonal opposite of Ang's work. It's literally a balls-out, hilarious, and over-the-top story mixing magic and queer culture in the most wonderful and ridiculous ways possible. It's a high fantasy story involving the latest in a series of Mystical Boy Scouts, a magical being "imbued with the oratory skills of Demosthenes, the wit of Oscar Wilde, the allure of St. Sebastian, and blessed with the greatest capacity for anal penetration in the world." 

MBS has to defend his shared space for queers against a housing inspection. He utilizes the diamond he keeps in his ass, a magical smoke being who can summon cigarettes, magical flying prostate power, and the Soviet dog Laika to defeat his opponents. Billings' line is delightfully wobbly and his character design is a mixture of absurdly cartoony and sensitively naturalistic. This is a comic that manages to be a whole lot of things at once: silly adventure, tender romance, queer activism, and bawdy fun. 

My favorite of the six books from Glom Press, though, is the thirty page comic My Big Life by Bailey Sharp. I've been following Sharp's work since her days at the Center for Cartoon Studies, and her work has only become more daring and unusual. Billed as "somebody's memoir," it's an incredibly dense, philosophical, and unpredictable journey through mental health, capitalism, petty crime, tourist economies, and so much more. The nearest comparison I can think of to describe Sharp's work is Gabrielle Bell, only more grotesque and absurd. Her rubbery, elongated line gives her main character an almost serpentine quality, especially since she has just one extended eye that we can see at all times. 

The book begins with its narrator falling out of love, literally crawling out of bed and down the street, and finding a new job at a bookstore. The story touches on her emotionally abusive boss who demanded she read books that he'd quiz her on. The fact that nearly every book was about sad young men with unsated lust is a very witty commentary on gatekeeping in general and how canons are established. Sharp's storytelling is every bit as fluid as her line, as the narrator keeps sliding from scenario to scenario. She goes from living above the bookstore to living with a woman who turns out to be a con artist. That character, Luanne, is a marvel of design. With a conical head, heavy eyelashes, and hair put up in a ponytail, she resembles a bizarre muppet of some kind. 

From there, Sharp accelerates the narrative. The narrator buys a property in a town with achingly beautiful sunsets and starts a tourist industry around it. She meets up with Luanne again. All throughout the book, Sharp keeps things moving using a nine-panel grid. At this point, each panel becomes an entire narrative of its own, like "worked on a ranch" followed by "got caught stealing" followed by "learned to swim." Sharp's narrator comments on all of these events as they relate to her constant headaches and the slow drag of time in reality. Her bullet-pointed version goes by quickly for the reader, but she assures us that it is all very tedious. The final page circles back to the beginning of the book and satirically grants her peace through simplicity. It's especially funny because the break-up she mentions as "her big regret" that caused her so much misery is not described in any detail. We have no idea why the relationship was so significant, what her boyfriend was like, or anything else. In the end, neither does she.

Every one of these books from Glom Press is worth reading. It's clear that Pearson and Hawkins favor the kind of line that goes well with Risograph printing: some version of ratty, minimalist, expressive, or grotesque. The themes are personal and the commentary is pointed. These books are beautiful art objects as well as well-designed for reading. They have the look and feel of minicomics but with no set length; indeed, one of their goals as a publisher is to provide a bridge between classic zines and slicker graphic novels. Their celebration of their artists' idiosyncrasies and the way they make each book look its best are a testament to their belief in the work and the overall alt-comics scene in Australia. 

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Rob Clough has written about comics for Cicada, the Comics Journal, Sequential, tcj.com,
sequart.com, Savant, Foxing Quarterly, Studygroup Magazine, as well as for his own blog, High-Low (highlowcomics.blogspot.com).