Arrivals and Departures – November 2024

The NBA season just started so that means two things:

I will definitely be spending less time reading comics. Your reaction to that will depend on your enthusiasm for this column.
Red Panda half-time shows are back, baybeee!

Who do you think the Lebron James of comics is? The Steph Curry? Chet Holmgren? LaMelo Ball? Sound off in the comments or send your very own professional basketball/art comics comparables to the editors at TCJ. They’d love to read them! ["love" is a strong word- ed.] Here are some reviews…

Window by Lily Blakely

I don’t think it’s a controversial opinion at this point (at least in comics) to discredit the heft behind the old adage, “You can’t judge a book by its cover.” That’s exactly what drew me into Window in the first place. Look at those off-centered horizontal bars adding both an atypical pattern and mystery. Look at the interplay between the cool blues and deep yellows. Goodness gracious, look at those gouache rain droplets everywhere! I was in awe when I saw it and that’s why I was especially let down when the writing and artistic decisions inside don’t live up to the cover and the story itself is an unsubtle, ersatz Rear Window, but now with extra jacking off.

Cut-off and overlapping speech balloons are all over this comic full of true crime tidbits, podcast quotes about anxiety, and “desperate singles compete for…” reality TV tags. They serve as inescapable background noise and heavy handed reminders that Blakely is looking to explore the themes of lowest-common denominator shock tactics slipping into every form of media, technology-led loneliness, and our age of exploitation. Just call me Old Man Context (and I complained about this very same thing in September’s column), but all of these topics were near-endlessly commented upon 20-30+ years ago, usually with much more tact and bite than is offered in Window. Not to say that fight is a lost cause (I’m for fighting everything), but as a reader, I’m looking for a hot take and this comic does not explore anything new in any way. What it does is follow an unnamed woman channel surfing through shows blasting lines like, “New studies show that over 60% of young people have no friends,” while wearing a T-shirt that reads, “SEE ME” on it. The woman notices a shirtless man in the apartment building across the street fondling himself and, getting off on being a first-time voyeur, follows suit. She sees him in a crosswalk the next day and later returns to her neon window. This time he waves before they get off simultaneously. We’ve got a rule of three on our hands because on the next day the the man starts shuffling huge signs “Subterranean Homesick Blues”-style that state things like, “Don’t Hide” and “You Want This.” This is when Blakely has her main character become a voyeur into her own life and reality becomes untethered.

Again, the gouache painting is really the high spot. I’m sure it was enormously labor intensive and digital coloring can’t hold a candle to the real thing like this, but it doesn’t make up for every other aspect of this book. Blakely is obviously, objectively talented, but this more illustrator-y than cartoony style makes me feel absolutely nothing. (See also: Karl Stevens.) Maybe I’m just against this type of realism. Maybe I need to reread da gawd R. Fiore again. It all ends with the woman crying in the street that separates the two buildings and the man rushing out to comfort her. This conclusion, and Window itself, is going for psychologically taut but feels more psychologically limp.

Paper Cuts by Jim Terry

Not too long ago there were places like Mirage Studios and Eclipse Comics. Not too long ago, “indie” meant something different than it does now. Not too long ago Fantagraphics was regularly publishing people like Jack Jackson, like William Messner-Loebs, like Dennis Fujitake. I’m too young to be nostalgic about any of this, but it does seem like once upon a time there used to be a lot more room for restless draftsmen — cartoonists who could tell a more traditionally tinged longform story with nothing but ink, ingenuity and a little of that sweet, sweet fruit falling from the John Severin tree. There used to be a space for these people under the art comics umbrella and I wouldn’t mind a bit more of it after reading Paper Cuts. This introduction is all just a roundabout way to say that I think Jim Terry makes comics in this particular vein and what could have possibly been a throwaway assignment to fulfill a residency requirement is most likely one of the highlights of his career.

Terry completed this 24-page black-and-white comic as an artist-in-residence at the Newberry Library in Chicago earlier this year. Entirely heavy yet readable in every way, Terry struggles with imposter syndrome and other intangible complications as he reflects on his art, his role in the residency, the urban habitat he currently resides in, and his Ho-Chunk ancestry. Sincere and deft writing (mostly in the second-person) aside, Terry’s inks throughout the comic are spectacular. There are several variations of ink washes and densities as Terry renders cliffsides, tree leaves, and deep black water sometimes all in the same panel. More artists working in black-and-white should use their raw scanned pages without fixing or flattening anything. One spread has Terry interpret historical “manifest destiny” as a huge tsunami of white, featureless restroom-sign people lifting into the sky and about to crash down upon him. It’s thrilling and unsettling and reminds me of the locusts in Jeff Smith’s Bone, but without any of the levity. Though the best part of Paper Cuts may be Terry’s ability to exude emotion, especially in a scene where he hides behind a tree and captures a sinking, shame-filled, anti-euphoria tingle deep in his spine. It’s a heartbreaking scene crafted by a cartoonist at the top of his game. When you read as many “funny” animals comics as I do, as many comics with artists pushing their eccentric style (real or imagined), as many twee, self-serving, middle-of-the-goddamn-road comics as I do, you forget that someone drawing perfect anatomy and ink-washed nature and nuanced character acting has a place in all this too.

Elated #2 by Marco Pickett

Elated is a one-man anthology that alternates between short stories and (way more interesting) sketchbook pages. But what it really is is an artist searching for a voice. I’ll give you the good news first: Pickett can sure crosshatch a cityscape. He can pack the paper with a dizzying amount of jumbled buildings and streets teeming with urban-fantasy weirdos going about their day. The back cover features six characters loitering amongst daisies, magazines and flip phones scattered on the sidewalk. One has a hound-dog head. Another is a bug-eyed baby chick humanoid. They’re all shadowed by skyscrapers and apartment buildings jigsawing the entire background. I only wish the interior stories compared well to the outer jacket.

In terms of the eight one-pagers in this issue, there’s not a lot of there there. Each one has a number of small, square panels with stories that somehow suffer from their brevity, but also seem to drag on forever. They all have cute, sham endings and I don’t think I’ll be dipping into spoiler territory to list the text on the final panels here:

“You’re special!”

“I hope it never ends… It never will”

“Help yourself!”

“Dance the night away!”

I wrote last month that I liked the anti-cynical stylings of a few new cartoonists on the scene, but Pickett’s writing doesn’t feel like that. Mainly because his stories don’t feel tied to reality whatsoever. The best one features a cat with a crazy face right out of an Outcault strip. The drawing of the animal is disturbing in the best way, but the narrative still ends with the term, “Joy…” I’m not sure if thumbnailing or beforehand scripting are the answer — I just hope, in the future, Pickett gets much more personal and peculiar than the little greeting card anecdotes that are offered here. I haven’t read the first issue of Elated so this is just conjecture, but this artist seems young and sketching might just be a hobby to pass the time for him. And that’s more than fine! All the same, at “Arrivals and Departures” I’m yearning for something more ambitious. Pickett shows with his larger drawings and covers that he’s got something. I just don’t quite know what it is yet, and I don’t think he does either.

OK, I’m off to watch a Bulls game and hope they lose so they can get a high draft pick next year. Speaking of, who’s the Cooper Flagg of comics? Is the Rob Liefeld jeans commercial the closest thing comics has gotten to a NIL deal? In December I’m going to try to squeeze in those last few books of the year that I’m especially excited about. (I’m excited about alllll your submissions. Don’t worry!) 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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