White Picket Fences
Written by Matt Anderson & Eric Hutchins
Art by Micah Farritor & Brian Mead
Published by Ape Entertainment
Preview Here
Emailed To The Factual Opinion By The Publisher
It takes a couple of pages to realize what White Picket Fences is--after all, the last thing anybody at the Factual Office expected was for somebody to email a pdf of a comic, and then seem to want us to read it. We assumed that this comic must include some type of brilliantly innovative avant-garde storytelling or something--but this is another thing. It's a kids comic--nothing offensive, nothing too violent, no terribly concealed "adult" jokes involving sex or pop-cultural referencing--this is about a trio of boys, a town with monsters, absent-minded parents and a local ex-pulp hero type named Mr. Reason. You know, like Hudsucker Proxy. For kids.
The collected experience here at our Brooklyn location has a significant gap for what the obvious audience is--one side of the team knows a lot about what mid-30's assholes like, and the remainder of the comics team can talk for hours about 2 year olds. So, without any actual evidence, we're going to go ahead and say that this is pretty good stuff, although it's probably a little too tame for most of the people who are currently out there purchasing comic books--there's no spandex here, obviously, and there's no relationships being analyzed, and it isn't about Rusty Brown. It's about kids throwing a baseball over the fence separating them from a suspicious house, and the monsters they find. It's about wishing you were an interplanetary explorer, and finding out the new kid has a remote-control lizard. It's what more comics would be like if the industry hadn't lobotomized itself and succumbed to the demands of the OCD unit. Hopefully, Ape Entertainment will be able to get this book into more than just the direct market comics shops, as the potential for something like this to go ignored must, we imagine, be high.
The art is an odd mix of kinetics and cartoons--sharp angled haircuts and two dimensional noses abound, but again, this isn't trying to be anything beyond clever entertainment. If it had sidled more to the artsy look of a Craig Thompson, it wouldn't work nearly as well as it does. That being said, it's sometimes a bit confusing as to what sort of landscape the characters are moving around in, but taken as a whole, it's well constructed. Again, being a printed copy of a pdf, it's highly possible that this will have a cleaner look when it arrives in a the actual comic book.
Medusa
By Jessica Abston & Alex Kim
Published by Alex Kim
Purchased From The Artist
Not really a poem, not really a monologue, but a defiantly creative sort of object/comic, Medusa looks like a quick little mini-comic--what it actually is a 5 foot wide sheet of paper (about 7 inches tall) that describes nothing more than a young woman watching a young man (who, due to the words, must be the boyfriend) as he gets out of the bed, gets dressed, and walks out the door. He never speaks, we never see more than the back of her head, and that's it.
It's brilliant. Make sure that if you track it down, which is easier than you think, you unfold it all the way at some point. Tack it to a wall, and read it that way. Abstom words by themselves would probably still be touching, and Kim's art would still be as excellent--together, the two end up working seamlessly.
A Small Story Of Love & Death
by Alex Kim
Published by Alex Kim
Purchased From The Artist
On the other hand that is mini-comics, Alex Kim also wrote a love story about a couple of rats on a subway track, and the impact that their deaths had on a dude who liked looking at them. As with most mini-comics that aren't based in avant-gardian aspects, this little bad boy is really only going to work for you if you can tolerate rats and people who have emotional relationships with their imagined romances. So much of an emotional relationship that it affects ones ability to go to work for a week. If you're somebody, like this reader, who would rather all rats be blended into a grainy substance used for fertilizer, and you'd rather that people who skip work for a week because they are "sad" just take themselves out of the whole breathing air equation, than you're probably just going to admire the cover, which is very nice. That's the tragedy of mini-comics sometimes: if you can't make yourself care, than you're probably not going to be a big fan. And I don't care about rats.
The Bird & The Bear: Doormats Of Life
By Alex Kim
Published by Alex Kim
Purchased From The Artist
Most mini-comics aren't even worth mentioning, you know? Like blogs. Most blogs aren't even worth mentioning either. Hell, that actually holds true for everything, really. Almost everything you'll hear when you actually listen to those free mp3 downloads PR guys send out is terrible, but isn't even terrible enough to make it fun to be mean about it. With mini-comics, it's not just people who write up reviews of them, you either want them to be really great, or really terrible. Otherwise, they're just like everything else--variations on banal/mediocre, or worst of all average. Meat is just about the only thing that is good as a medium, except maybe fountain drinks.
Bird & The Bear is another variety of the "really great"-- one of those comics that, while nicely printed, was obviously put together by hand. Yet, unlike everything else put together by hand, like macaroni sculptures and finger turkeys, it's a professional, intelligent piece of work. In a completely odd, Chris Ware by way of Huizenga way, it's about a couple that moonlights as super-heroes--Batman level super-heroes, but costumes nonetheless. In other words, it combines those two things that usually like to operate on the poles--masked crusaders and relationship comics. They fight muggers! And they watch television! And have a first kiss! And get stabbed! In every possible way, this should be completely awful. But instead, it's like magic on the page. It's way more "realistic" than anything Marvel or DC publishes, it's way more entertaining than anything Jeffrey Brown ever "wrote" and it's, over and over and over and over again, a totally great comic to re-read. While it seems totally unlikely that something like this could work for 300 issues, it also seems like totally the greatest thing ever if it would try to work for 300 issues, and cross-over with Acme Novelty Library and Secret Invasion at the same time. It's balls-out. Alex Kim? Brainaic 6.
Only Skin: New Tales Of The Slow Apocalypse 1 & 2
By Sean Ford
Published by Sean Ford
Purchased From The Artist
Unlike Alex Kim, Ford is going for a different type of indie-vibe here, with the first two of what will hopefully be a lasting series in a Love & Rockets indebted tale. While looking more like an Anders Nilsen by way of Pac-Man creation than anything the Brothers Hernandez ever created, the story of a small town and it's disappearing residents is one that has a spiritual kinship (at least) to the trials and tribulations of the residents of Palomar--complete with a floating Ghost where a little black monkey would be. As with any story that's relatively (we imagine) a ways from being finished, most of what comes out of reading this is a desire to know more than one of really knowing what's going on--what is happening to the disappeared, what the little ghosts motive is, what's hiding in the forest--you 
know, the tell-me-the-end-of-the-movie questions. Luckily, Ford has figured out
to develop and draw characters enough so that they don't all behave as interchangeable and indistinct men and women--it's a small cast, but there's plenty of cartoonists with no real ability to differentiate beyond anything other than gender. Ford doesn't have that problem. Each and every voice here is distinct--a younger brothers feeling of uselessness in the face of his siblings embrace of adult responsibility, a overly sensitive young man's angst when others don't take his "feelings" on as nakedly as he displays them--there's none of the "is this the boyfriend or what" kind of confusion. Besides the comic itself, one of the most respectable parts of the Only Skin experience is the care and concern placed into the object itself--Ford clearly can't be paying rent with this comic, but instead of cheaping out and constructing something more economically beneficial, he's gone ahead and imitated the style of the Fantagraphics Ignatz line, consciously or not. More than a few creator-published comics look like they're just saving their pennies until someone like Drawn & Quarterly handles the bills--Ford's gone ahead and added more than just an artistic heart and soul. He's put in some thankless expense as well.
Bohda Te
By Jamie Smart
Published by Slave Labor Graphics
Found After Some Leg Work, "Critical Rape" Requested By Author
Jamie Smart draws like Evan Dorkin by way of the Hello Kitty factory--it's no big surprise that there's more t-shirts featuring the characters here then there are comics. If you're somebody who likes to wear cartoon characters on your chest, but not the Iron Man kind, than you'll probably eat this stuff alive. Whether the actual comics are the loss leader for the shirts or not is probably a question for Slave Labor Graphics, the company behind this and Smart's spin-off, Ubu Bubu. (Or is it the other way around? Which came first? The cartoon cat of demonic possession or the story of where the cat used to live?)
Bohda Te, the comic, initially looks like it's--well, like it's an Evan Dorkin comic drawn by somebody who errs on the side of cute. Black and white, bold, circular linework, Jamie Smart's work is certainly attractive to look out. Like Dork, it also, on first glance, looks like a compendium of short gag strips, 1-2 page stories with titles and introductions, the whole nine yards of the fucked-up nasty humor anthology. It's not, though--Smart is using title pages more as chapter headings, as all of the characters here--the cute yet evil cat, the numbskull soldiers, the "Angry Little Robot" and, yes, something called Mecha-Dookie all end up coming together sooner rather than later. It's, sorry to say, too bad that they do--the Angry Little Robot and the soldiers could serve to be their own comic--as it is, they're forced into a mildly confusing (while still comprehensible) story involving some type of gigantic black monster that behaves like the world devourer in a million other similar stories. (And looks sort of like Tom Neely's Blot.) With something as piecemeal as Bohda Te, the story is going to succeed more on the strength of it's parts than the sum--yet the only parts of the story that are actually funny have already been mentioned. The Dookie thing is just--oh, it's just what it sounds like. Not really funny, or clever, or anything else. It's not gross, it's just childish and stupid. If the comic was for kids, that would be one thing--but, as the cover says, Bohda Te "Contains Offensive Material," which means that something that's really fucking high-larious to 8 year olds, like giant talking shit controlled by a hateful little girl, well, they aren't here to laugh at it. Instead it's stuck in a comic who's audience is going to be limited anyway. (Finding a copy of Bohda Te was a bit more difficult than originally anticipated when we agreed to review it. We found our copy under a stack of Alan Moore's Supreme trades. Where we you find yours? Bohda Te!)
It doesn't mean that Smart isn't a talented cartoonist--he most certainly is, and there's quite a display of craft going on here. But it's craft in the service of lazy writing--as clever as the quips get when the Little Robot starts torturing the soldiers, the majority of the dialog and "plot" is just grindingly dull nonsense that isn't very funny, or original, or anything else. That's the major problem with Bohda Te--that there's clear talent here, and a lively imagination as well. But if one ignores the art completely, and takes the story itself at face value, it's just lazy--and it makes it seem less like someone trying to create something, and more like somebody trying to get their t-shirts in front of more eyeballs.
-Tucker Stone, 2008
Sean Ford and Alex Kim's work is available at the I Know Joe Kimpel website, along with other graduates and affiliates of the The Center For Cartoon Studies. White Picket Fences is soon to be released, and is available for order through Diamond. Bohda Te is hopefully easier for you to find than it was for us. If you go to Forbidden Planet in New York, they now have copies on their "Sick of Super-Heroes" endcap. For that, you have the reviewer to thank.
Comments