Arrivals and Departures – June 2024

I went to the open “Tot Gym” last week and let me tell you, if you are a stay-at-home parent, you better have a strong raft to sail the seas of isolation. I’ve been trying to open myself up, to make other father-friends, but it’s often laughable and laborious. One guy just had “DAD” written on his name tag. Another dude was wearing an ax-throwing shirt and my spidey-senses were tingling in regard to how many Utilikilts he owned back at home. Most importantly, these dads haven’t even heard of M.K. Brown. They can’t bring up Abner Dean in conversation. They don’t know anything about comics. And the problem isn’t me. I’m pleasant, I tell you. Pleasant! Here’s some new stuff that I’ve read that no one wants to talk about on the playground.

 

Crux #2 by Virgil Warren

This comic begins with a real-estate-based demonic possession and eventually veers into laments about vegan bagel sandwiches. These are tonal shifts I can get behind! It helps that Warren’s style has sprinkles of German Expressionism, graffiti art, and speculation-era black-and-white cartooning. There’s no negative space in Crux, no rest stops — thick slashes and crosshatching fill all of the 27 pages. The story itself is just as loaded. Warren pummels you with waggish asides and interconnected details, mushing your nose right up into that binding. At first we meet the demon Paimon as he takes over the body of a bigshot landlord. An archangel enters a devil dive bar looking for Paimon and gets a tip. There’s also a superhero subplot that surprised me (I have not read issue #1) and didn’t make me want to throw the book across the room. Crux is loaded with lines and ideas — evictions, missing kids, gentrification. Warren connects it all and makes a story not so much about good versus evil, but propounds how evil and eviler coincide. A wise man once said, “If there is a hell below, we’re all going to go.”

 

 

Crux is missing some of the color and texture that make Warren’s paintings really shine, although I happily take the pros with the cons here because this comic is a bit more raw, more dynamically slapdash. About midway through the story, a character claims, “The city is cursed.” Warren sure makes you feel that way especially when he’s drawing long hallways and streets. Points and lines of horizon are used daringly from beginning to end to make both interior and exterior landscapes claustrophobic and unsettling, like a dark-ride optical illusion. With all these moving parts (political, religious, economic, baked goods) it will be tough to stick the landing in future issues. But Virgil Warren seems to me like an artist you shouldn’t doubt.

 

Makinaphobe by Rafael Zaiats

As another wise man once said, “I can’t decipher any of this.”¹ The renegade explorer Rhezus has to transverse a future world designed exclusively for vehicles to get to a bread-making party with his friends. There, a mystical battle with the powerful Ave takes place that may change the course of this land and everyone who is unlucky enough to reside there. Get it? Well, I most definitely did not, because all of this information I had to glean from various solicitation copy because the pages of this book are mostly incomprehensible. The main chunk of Makinaphobe is a sprawling 144 pages and only contains about 30 panels with any dialog. More attention is paid to insert panels and character closeups with border flourishes than actual storytelling. If you, as a cartoonist, are choosing to make what is a relatively silent comic, then special care must be taken to forge a clear path and catch the reader up on what is happening in your mind and between the panels. This book packs a whole lot of dynamism into each page, but that’s all it seems to be in service of. It’s pizzazz over narrative.

 

Zaiats — from Georgia (the country, not the state) — is obviously someone well-versed in fantasy-genre manga. He fills the page with floaty action and wide-eyed emotion, however I keep coming back to this: You can have the most drop-dead gorgeous comic yet everything becomes moot when the reader can’t tell what’s happening between the top half of the page and bottom. Doesn’t change the fact that there are some beautiful drawings here though. A train with a fiery face becomes increasingly sentient and severe in its attempts to take out Rhezus. Ave, who changes sizes and anatomy throughout the comics pulls a little “2 Become 1” with a computerized bread machine. Zaiats seems to have wanted Makinaphobe to be both a stream of consciousness and a grand epic and I’m not sure those are compatible. Ultimately Zaiats puts a lot of effort into making this book dream-like and is successful in a sense. But it’s one of those dreams where you’re falling — it contains a few quick startles then is immediately forgotten.

 

Out on the Girl Farms #2 by Ana Woulfe

Here’s a doozy of a comic, and … Do you hear those trumpets? The procession has begun to award Ana Woulfe with a gold medal for including one page at the beginning explaining very preliminarily who the characters are and what has happened in the previous issue of a serialized story. Congratulations to Ana and to you and to me, who refuses to read issue #1 of anything. To the girl farms we go! Scientists are beginning to disappear after trying to study a mysterious boiling rose. Putt Putt and Queenie also want to know more about this flower, but they’d rather go to a hardcore show first. They don’t want to discuss the rose, but they do. They like being social, but it wears them out. And it just goes like this — an indecisive back and forth — for a while. Dissociation and exhaustion are not experiences that I feel are particularly translated well onto the comics page (or something I really connect with at all). An artist can talk about those unique feelings in a caption or in their dialogue, but I'm not sure they can portray it effectively. Especially when someone is as highly stylized as Woulfe. Unfortunately that makes the meat of this issue. Luckily, Woulfe’s character drawings hum with energy. Even with all their geometric mugs, huge eyes and vibrating lines, the comic itself is a breeze to read. The writing makes me feel like the quiet one in a friend group, not always following what is exactly going on, swishing my eyes left and right trying to take in all the chaotic comradery.

 

 

One of the many great joys in life is seeing a cartoonist really nail a sky. (The title for all-time greatest clouded sky is held by Gilbert Hernandez.) Here, Woulfe specializes in a starry night sky with a Rory Hayes-esque elegance. Putt Putt gets dropped off and spends time in the night garden staring upward at big splotch comets and a boomerang moon before getting a message (and a cliffhanger for issue #3) from the boiling rose. After reading Girl Farms the first couple times, I thought, “I’m not sure this comic hits the mark,” but here I am a week later still thinking about it several times a day. It was a lot to process and that’s ultimately the point of it all, I think? It may be about delving into horticulture as a way to study yourself? Or perhaps how communication and companionship can be like toiling the soil? All I do know with all certainty is that the hand-bejeweled cover was a nice touch.

 

 

Tales from Qyleoth #1–3 by M. Yaxam

This series of pink, blue and green minicomics ranging from 8 to 12 pages came to me as a recommendation from Nate Garcia. As a general rule, “Arrivals and Departures” welcomes any and all personal endorsements from other artists, but the bar is now set. They better be this damn good! Yaxam draws and writes with an Underground feel — Qyleoth stories wouldn’t be out of place in something like Rip Off Comix or even witzend — but isn’t harkening back to those by any means. There’s no blatant “looks of a time” cheesiness here. I find most fantasy work (in all mediums) to be a slog, but this series doesn’t pander to genre suckers. The vibes are much more Mouseton than Middle-Earth. I don’t want to completely gild the lily, but to me (a four-time Eisner-losing critic), this little gem of a series is nearly flawless.

 

Peglu is timid, unsightly and resembles a Monchhichi. He lives with his scheming, snouted brother Finnerack, who fancies himself a spellcaster, but spends more time bickering. Finnerack sends Peglu on a quest to the junkheap find a frying pan replacement. Along the way we are introduced to a longhaired friendly flyer named Lazora, an armadillo with connections, and several other creatures of various temperaments. (Say it with me: “Bring Back Critters!”) After Finnerack berates his brother and sends him on his way, he pops out of their underground bunker and tells him to sincerely “be careful.” Later, Lazora gives another character a hug who seems surprised by the intimacy. In another scene a character flips out, so frustrated with hearing another one sniffling their nose. All of these examples tell me that Yaxam seems refreshingly more concerned with character development than empty world building. The three-issue arc feels planned out with punchlines and call-backs, but Yaxam feels like he’s given himself plenty of room for bubbly bog pockets of improvisation as well. Issue #3 concludes in my favorite way — no one has learned anything and a large cast of characters only have a path of utter destruction to show for it. If these stories were drawn 50 years ago they’d be favorably and rightfully featured in Rebel Visions next to someone like Gilbert Shelton. But this isn’t 50 years ago, it’s now, and I’ll take a hundred more issues please!

Thanks as always for reading “Arrivals and Departures.” July will be focused on the plethora of anthologies coming out these days. See you next month, I hope.

Questions, love letters and submissions to this column can be directed to @rjcaseywrites on Instagram.

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