It’s the end of the year and all the heavy hitters are coming out to play. In the last couple months we’ve had Burns and Blomerth, Ware and Westvind. We’ve had Schrauwen. We’ve had Edward Steed. We’ve had Jessica freakin’ Farm. One of these I’ve read four times cover to cover, the others I haven’t even cracked open yet. (Which one? “I’ll never tell…”) This is all to say that my reading time is mostly devoted to this column, for better or for worse. Thinking ahead — and always trying to reward myself with tiny little treats — I saved a few books I was exceptionally excited about as a year-end dessert of sorts. Will they be extra-premium ice cream in fresh waffle cones or decade-old biscotti chunks found in between cushions? Metaphors and comics — I can’t get enough of ’em!
Bernadette #1 edited by Angela Fanche, Katie Lane, Juliette Collet and Clair Gunther
Was 2024 the year anthologies officially made a comeback? I put this particular one aside a few months ago because it had already received two TCJ write-ups (in this economy?!), but I couldn’t keep my greedy fingers off for long. The paper stock and overall size make the bright Fanche cover even more stirring. The XL pages really spotlight Molly Dwyer’s impeccable inking (she’s tops on the I-want-to-lay-my-eyes-on-those-original-pages list of artists currently), allow Sarah Kirby to go on a topsy-turvy roadtrip with a blue pen and give Clare Gunther a lot more space to futz around. (That’s a compliment.) It all ends with another Oli Lee miraculous escapade and the more paper-filling and scroll-like Lee’s comics become, the more they feel like being hit by a crack of thunder. The height and width — the full-on breathing room — truly benefits all the artists here. Even the ones who don’t draw. (Just kidding! Please sign my Change.org petition to keep photography out of comic collections.)
Sam Seigel’s untitled story in Bernadette is a four-page marvel. It deploys the first-person tense and exaggeration to create something that feels like semi-autobiographical tall tale mythology. Seigel’s cursive, black-and-white lettering often hits the panel borders or goes outside them altogether. An account of a period of time in someone’s life that is whimsical, but has its feet firmly planted — it reminds me of “Self-Portrait” by M.K. Brown. That’s high praise because I don’t throw around the name of this column’s patron saint lightly.
The last standout I wanted to mention was by a new artist to me — Vera Bekema. She brings the high strangeness in a story called “Cucumber Zombies” that added some much needed silliness to this whole affair. Bekema’s work looks like she draws comics with black ink on graph paper and this one’s about cucumbers growing on trees as tall as houses that turn whoever eats them into undead dingbats. Every panel is meticulous and entirely off-kilter — in a book where most of the other cartoonists rarely use any straight lines, Bekema’s style feels subversive. Bernadette, folks. It’s good.
Grmlkrz by Tracy Chahwan
Chahwan is a cartoonist I like a ton, but have read very little of… and US publishers are to blame. She has a line and inking style that feels totally fevered and unique. It is criminal that Pantheon or Fantagraphics hasn’t released a hardcover of her graphic novel Beirut Bloody Beirut. It’s published in France! Why can’t I have it here? Zut alors, I tell ya. But now we’re going to talk about this brand new one.
The cover features a drawing of Chahwan facedown in bed and the title comes from the sound of a hungover mumblesnore. These comics-for-the-morning-after are all short, one to five pages in length, and are about growing up in Lebanon, navigating a menagerie of suitors, and surveying her new home, America. The good ol’ USA, in these comics, comes off as a place where everything makes perfect sense or no sense at all, where everyone’s a huge mark and simultaneously trying to get one over on you. Chahwan puts herself out there and continually leaps before she looks and, as readers, we’re all the better for it. She’s an extremely astute observer and is able to make her homesickness and confusion not only humorous, but universal as I have to assume more and more people to varying degrees are not feeling exactly at home in this country.
By far the best part of this comic was the autobiographical strip “The Suicide” in the middle. It’s exciting to read autobio that has a wholly original perspective and doesn’t fall under one of the genre’s two major wings: diagnoses chronicles or lifestyles of the impotent miserablists. In Grmlkrz we watch Chahwan’s lust for life vigorously jousting with her jaded worldview and tension arise when her I-know-what-I’m-doing savvy rub up against hedonistic tendencies. She is chaotic, extravagant and an obscenely talented artist that makes comics that are gnarly and from the gut. We’ve got an appetizer platter in this comic, but I want to read more. Publishers, step up to the plate — you’ve got a star on your hands here!
Trinket Comics #1 edited by Minnie Slocum and Floyd Tangeman
I had high hopes for this one because of the two-headed monster editorialship. Tangeman is the future of comics, but proves himself to be the now of sound effects in this six-page Trinket offering. A person gets sucked clean up by a bathroom mirror creature (“Slorp.” “Expyaxwyqz!” “SKRUYSHX!”) and eventually becomes one with them as the final panel “mirrors” the first. Tangeman often creates comics that snack on danger and dine on death, but this one didn’t do much for me.
The other co-editor, Minnie Slocum, on the other hand, brings a heavy helping of her homemade surrealistic heat. I was first hipped to Slocum from her work in Jaywalk earlier this year and am more and more impressed each time I encounter her stories. She has a ’90s art-fair feel to her figure work that somehow gets nostalgia and inventiveness to march in time. Her writing and pacing, especially in these half-a-dozen pages, run the full gamut from just-peachy to completely riveting. In Trinket we have panels bordered and adorned with stars and tiny ants and curlies — Slocum makes some of my favorite comics in the world where select pages and drawings could have been hanging up in my Aunt Judy’s bathroom beside an Anne Geddes print of babyflowers. Take this for what you will, but I believe Minnie Slocum comics are the antithesis of AI art.
Sadly the majority of the stories in Trinket did not stop me in my tracks. I’m feeling agreeable, however, so I will skip right over to Jade Mar’s submission, which was utterly arresting. (Where can I see more of this artist’s work?) It starts at a fast food restaurant where a friend is recounting a journey to see a psychic. This character has to travel down a winding cobblestone path to a building that looks like a traffic cone while two masked figures ride around in a circular monorail above. The angles in which everything is drawn and the pointillism along the panel borders leave you either heartbroken or uplifted, depending on how you interpret what the psychic sees. This is a beautiful, beautiful comic.
I would have liked to see more of the Trinket contributors swing for the fences — overall the book consists of quick hits of aesthetics and dopamine. This isn’t some great meaningful bellow into the yawning abyss. But it isn’t an abysmal yawn either. Sometimes an anthology is just an anthology.
And that concludes 2025. I hope all your dreams came true. God bless Gerald Jablonski. See you next year, I hope.
Questions, love letters and submissions to this column can be directed to @rjcaseywrites on Instagram.
The post Arrivals and Departures — December 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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