Welcome to a new year of Arrivals and Departures! If you’re here for the first time (or your 2024 resolution was to read more very niche microreviews) I promise to keep covering the world of small press and self-published artists and the hearty abundance of “ugly, messy, fucked up, angry, trying things comics” that are being made today. And I won’t even hide behind a pen name. I’m RJ Casey and I approve this message.
Back on November 4, 2023, I attended the Short Run Comix & Arts Festival in Seattle. It was a good show. In fact, I talked to a few people there—people you’re aware of, people you respect—and we agreed it’s the most finely curated festival that we know of in terms of straight-up talent on the floor. I left with a considerable bounty which I’ll attempt to compress here:
Stories from Zoo by Anand
This was arguably the book of the show, and for good reason. Anand is an artist from Delhi and this collection of eight short stories from his one-man anthology was my introduction to his work. The book is full of people projecting, deflecting, and putting upon others, all sprinkled with magic realism. Some artists are experts at setting the scene and placing things in a concrete time and place. Others focus on their characters’ minor mannerisms and personality tics. Anand asks, “Why not both?”
There’s a story here called “4 Ears” about a guy with wedge-shaped ears on the top of his head navigating his day-to-day. His father only speaks through a spread newspaper barrier and his brother tries to long-distance analyze unrequited crushes based on their daily wardrobe choices. The specific and mounting absurdisms don’t reduce the meticulous dialogue and poignant conclusion in the least. It might be the best short story I read all of last year. My minor criticism—and it’s a severe nitpick—is that the color on the front and back cover are so distinct that I would have loved to see them come into play in the black & white comics themselves. Like Anand, great artists—maybe even your future favorite cartoonists—are out there right now, all around the world, producing work that will make you think and laugh for weeks. You just haven’t been exposed to them yet. I have to believe this, to keep going.
Froggie World Vol. 1 preview by Allee Errico
This is a six-page Risograph’d sneak peek of a larger collection Cram Books will be publishing sometime in early 2024. Errico is a talented drawer—especially when it comes to scratchy cityscapes—and seems determined to fill each page to the absolute brim with dialogue and friends and alleyways. The last panel of the first page has a message that reads, “Welcome to my beautiful diary someone will love in 100 years.”
If that’s Errico’s thesis statement, I find it rousing to come right out with that ambitious desire because it’s such a laudable tonal shift from the more typical autobio comics. Is there any other genre in any other medium with more of a faux “aw shucks” overtone? I’m glad this new generation of self-chroniclers seems to be saying bye-bye to that whole thing. We all know the autobio archetypes too (name ’em!) and from what little I’ve seen, Errico doesn't seem to fit into any. Can you tell I have a fraught relationship with autobiographical sequential works? Won’t stop me from being first in line to buy this book and dumping all this baggage onto it!
Rootless by Sarah Romano Diehl
Seattle comics scene staple Sarah Romano Diehl debuted this hallucinatory new zine at the show, complimenting her already prodigious catalog. Inside, Diehl tries something new - her black lines are occasionally highlighted over and under by a light shade of blue which gives her drawings a little added depth and amplifies the kaleidoscopic nature of it all. A woman pulls out an incisor, pockets it, then goes to a studio that specializes in “aura photography,” which is something I definitely had to look up.
Diehl then zooms in on the hole in the woman’s mouth which is the eventual source of the explosive color radiation. The character pays the man behind the camera with her unfastened tooth and then the photographer swallows it himself. (The “Gulp” in the concluding panel is the only word in the entire comic.) Rootless is a passable but somewhat slight story that would especially interest those who are into dream interpretation.
Rodeo Comics #3 by Evan Salazar
Salazar (along with Audra Stang, Alex Nall, and a handful of others) is one of the figureheads of a creative wave in comics right now that I’m calling the Post-Industrial Underdog Underground, or County-Fair-Core, or Nu Americana. Issue three of Rodeo is the latest addition to the travails of the Knox family and the inheritance of enigmas when secrets and memories, however minuscule seeming at the time, get held tightly over generations. There are brothers and uncles and nieces all in various states of affection and caginess. It feels like Sam Shepard and John Stanley collaborated on a Hey Arnold! comic adaptation. Take that for what you will, but it works for me.
Not a lot happens in Rodeo, but not a lot happens pretty well - the story is proving to be an intricate slow burn. My gripe with this comic is not something I hold against Salazar—he’s spinning his own web and giving credence to a faithful audience—but it is difficult to keep track and keep up if you don’t have the first two issues standing by. That’s probably been the reader’s plight when it comes to longer anthologized narratives forever and always.
.357 Redwood by Max Clotfelter
With the exception of Noah Van Sciver, nobody does the pathos of an unusual youth on the fringes better than Clotfelter. .357 is his newest minicomic, one panel per page, where no lessons are taught and no lessons are learned. The narrator—a young Clotfelter—and his brother find a duo of wild dogs in their backyard bunny hutch. The kids naturally panic and proceed to set off a small Southern-fried series of events that tests family dynamics and what a comic-reading audience may find hilarious or unseemly.
The highlight of this mini happens before the tragic climax, when Clotfelter’s mother, trying to find something to curtail the canine massacre, hurls a chunk of porcelain toilet bowl she finds lying in the yard towards the dogs. The whole thing is a quarterback blitz of tragedy and folly and I hope it appears in a larger short story collection down the road. Clotfelter can put more intimacy and voice into a single crosshatch or wavering hand-drawn panel border than most cartoonists can muster over their entire body of work.
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Welp, it looks like this Short Run recap has gotten away from me a little bit. Those are just half the comics I picked up there, so I’ll extend the coverage into February. Join me for the thrilling conclusion (just more reviews…) next month! I hope.
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Questions, love letters and submissions to this column can be directed to @rjcaseywrites on Instagram.
The post Arrivals and Departures – January 2024 appeared first on The Comics Journal.
Hello, my name is Jack Sparrow. I'm a 50 year old self-employed Pirate from the Caribbean.
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