Arrivals and Departures- September 2024

Welcome to year two of the highfalutin “Arrivals and Departures” experience! Like I stated in the very first column 365 days ago, I will continue covering cartoonists coming into their own and reviewing the comics that get stuck in my craw or become thorns in my side. All in all, I’m doing my best to avoid nostalgia and perfection and aggressively middling work while zeroing in on comics that have that juice — truthful, good, honest, exciting, inspirational, and alive. Like Clown and the boys say: “The only way is all the way.” So let’s slap our masks on and get going.

 

 

Cinema Time by MD Blue

 

This comic strip takes us back to the tranquil time of 2010, one square panel at a time (which makes it a perfect fit for Instagram constraints), and into the life of Henry Woodpecker. Big-footed and with the face of a vampire bat, Henry fancies himself a gentlemen film critic at large, eats pizza with a fork and knife, and appears one ill-fitting hat away from becoming a full-blown “m’lady” guy. Cinema Time gives us short glimpses into Henry’s life as it revolves around going to the theater and talking to someone, anyone, who will listen to him espouse his thoughts afterwards. Blue’s recreations of movie posters of the time — True Grit, Blue Valentine, Greenberg — bookend these mini-scenes after each conversational and/or situational punchline. The format is not unlike Daniel Clowes’s Wilson and it really works. (Wilson is so underrated and funny. I think about certain jokes from that book nearly weekly.)

 

 

Seemingly drawn straight ink to paper, the immediacy adds to both Blue’s style and the innate funniness of the story. Darkness — and since there are so many scenes in a multiplex it is an essential part of the strip — is rendered in long linear scratches. There’s not a lot of dynamism here, but the magic comes from the tight writing and bizarre character designs. Looking like Fraggle Rock Doozers, Emma and June meet Henry in the lobby by happenstance and attach themselves to his odd orbit, perhaps seeing him as an easy mark to take on a sublet with short notice or as some sort of romantic-comedy tinged co-stars. It’s hard to tell because Blue has created a focal point in Henry that leaves the reader unable to recognize just how much self-awareness he has. I’ve known people like this in my life — and I’m guessing so have you — and they are hard for authors to capture in fiction without going into full parody or nastiness. After a date, June invites Henry over to spend the night, but he chooses to ghost her and go to the theater instead. Throughout this strip, Blue makes you reluctantly root for Henry at times and utterly disdain him at others. But to Henry Woodpecker, it doesn’t matter how any of us readers feel, because he’s satisfied — with his choices, his films, his life. Peculiar and top notch, this strip gets two thumbs up from me.

 

 

The Method by Christina Lee

 

Three short stories are held here between a cover that fittingly looks like an Us Weekly. The first, titled “I Can Be Anything (You Want Me to Be)” is about the inner turmoil of a pop sensation, ala Britney Spears and her whole thing. It’s a nine-panel grid printed in blue and pink risograph (what would happen to the indie-comics-industrial complex if there was ever a riso pink ink shortage?) up until the end. That’s where Lee compares this singer to Sisyphus and her high heel snaps, (she also snaps, get it) causing the boulder to crush her. The second story, “Employee of the Month,” is the best one in this book. It features glassy eyed corporate drones working in a skyscraper, sending emails and using jargon. “Employee” far surpasses the other two in The Method not because of the subject matter, but because it’s definitely the most unhinged. Lee lets loose and has her temps and office administrators spill out of their character models, farting and in hysterics. My concern is that this type of commentary and satire is trodden beyond belief. Meaningless celeb culture and dull office jobs have been remarked upon countless times in all forms of media — Gen X kind of made it their whole thing — but we surely must be at the point in time where there’s no context for those pieces of media.

 

 

The final story is about a fictional stand-up comic in his 40s named Brad Harrison. He’s an edgy cancel-culture hack, but also Oscar nominated and featured on NPR, somehow? He has a lot of young, passionate girl fans that he’s very interested in keeping and obtaining more of. The most intriguing part is that there are two pages here where one of the girls is presented with an NDA and Lee prints a contract seemingly verbatim. I wouldn’t be surprised if the pages were real. There’s fake IDs and gross sexual exploitation through power dynamics and observations about slippery slope fandom and that’s the end of The Method. As I was reading this comic I kept singing the chorus to an old Art Brut song to myself that repeats the line, “Popular culture no longer applies to me.” At this point in my life I have a hard time caring about stuff — celebrities and the people who love them — and this comic, though well drawn and printed, did not change that fact.

 

 

Diary by Sophie Margolin

 

The cover features the author as a cryptid around a candlestick. Half butterfly, half caterpillar. Those insects — and examples of metamorphosis — occur all over this zine of short comics and drawings. On the second page is an illustration of a butterfly with an open cavity for an abdomen. The small caterpillar lies next to it, facing away. It might be the most striking image in Diary for its subtlety, its small size, its manifold meanings. Has the caterpillar rolled out of the butterfly body, not finding it fit? Has the caterpillar strived to reach that hole, but given up? Is the body a winged coffin itself? Later, there’s a caterpillar stuck in the void of a well, one with antennas and face down in the dirt, a Beanie Baby type caterpillar drawn next to a bandaged wrist. There’s a torn and defeated butterfly, chunks ripped out of its three-dimensionally rendered body. And finally, on the back cover, a butterfly with a dagger stuck through, bleeding out. All these caterpillars and butterflies with barely a chrysalis in sight.  I can’t help but think what Eric Carle would have made of all this.

 

 

I focused on the insects earlier because the rest is just so brutal. The bugs, as tortured as they may be, are still more pleasant to digest than, say, a double-page spread with the text, “You’ll be fine” on the left and a shredded, decomposing face on the right. Reading Diary is like crawling through a gauntlet of vulnerability. Margolin lugs the reader’s raw exposed nerve endings over an electric fence. Or you might want to go vice-versa with the artist and audience. It’s hard to tell. And hard to read. It’s fatiguing to get through Diary, but I must have gone back to the beginning after finishing it half a dozen times in a row because Margolin is so damn skilled. The smudgy pencil drawings of sets of eyes are haunting and the way she draws her own hair — these are autobiographical sketchbook pages after all — is completely distinctive, like tangled sentient pipe cleaners. This is one of those times where the scope of talent is so obvious, but I wish my introduction to Margolin would have potentially started with another title in her catalog. The trigger warning on the inside front cover is justified. 

 

Thanks for taking this trip with me through the first year of “Arrivals and Departures” and here’s to decades more. Decades! October is coming up and I’ve already cut out individual panels from Mr. A comics to pass out to the trick-or-treating kiddies. 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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