The Pacific Northwest is known for many things: beautiful mountain ranges, being a deranged tech epicenter, freshly foraged mushrooms. There’s the thrill of breathing in the fresh air amongst the evergreens and seeing how many dopey “Henry” murals you can spot. There’s the first sip of a muddy coffee or IPA (sometimes even combined!) while you kickflip over syringes on the sidewalk. But there’s also comics! Plenty and plenty of comics. You could even say as goes this region, so goes the health of art comics in general. Luckily for all of us, we have the Speck collective out of Portland. Each member of Speck released a new comic in 2024 and each one is widely and wildly different from the next. I’ll try my best to explain.
Frolic contains two stories which do have a connection even though that may be hard to believe. In the first, Amacher tells the tale of a gas-based succubus borne of a “dutch oven.” A lone character reading in bed farts under the covers and then appears a manic thiccxie dream girl and the story quickly becomes a classic tale of eco-erotica with a focus on the emission of natural gases. I always say, “Bring back Critters!,” however, what if instead they brought back Eros? No, no, never mind. I should have guessed what would happen next, but alas — I haven’t seen this many panels (pages, really) devoted to scat-play since A Girl on the Shore. I exhaled a laugh and inhaled a gasp, which is what Amacher may have intended or it was at least a serendipitous side effect. The story ends with this gas-based-being floating up into the vast heavens. Aghast I was taken. Truly.
There’s a swift shift from soft to hard science fiction in the second story, which is about Enceladus, one of Saturn’s moons. Human beings have settled on the orb that features volcanoes and jets constantly spewing hot hydrogen, oxygen, ammonia. Amacher uses narration boxes throughout to explain how the ravaging adults may be a lost cause, but the playful children — who are more apt to treat the celestial rock and each other with more respect — perhaps hold the key to survival. Throughout the whole comic Amacher skates that fine line between cartoony and more anatomically correct that’s very readable and there’s a heartfelt, downhill locomotion and sketchiness to all of it, not unlike someone like Frank Stack. In a macro sense, Frolic is about vents and smog and gas flows. Thankfully it’s not a climate apocolypse doomer comic — Amacher maintains an overall positivity, I believe, and sees the glass of carbon as half-full. Not sure I’ll return to this one, but I’m always grateful for a genuine shock to the system.
Meatloaf Castle #1 by Molly Lecko Herro
Castle is a stunner, a comic that could — and should — attract so many readers, both casuals and the hardcore alike. It’s often beautiful and sometimes biting, but in no way do I feel like it’s Lecko Herro’s best work. Nope, not yeeeetttt. And that’s not a put down in the least — I think it’s exciting and ultimately the reason I do this column month after month. I’ll try to clarify. Here is an artist whose influences are not exactly held closely to the vest — Castree is a big one, there’s also Estrada. The slow, off-putting uneasiness and inanity of “Meat Dave” gives me Renee French and there’s a blue and black color-blocked story called “Sky Woman” that could be out of a Lilli Carre collection. The comics themselves in this one-person anthology, though, tell me that she won’t be stuck at this station for long. Lecko Herro’s in a great spot for an emerging artist and what comes next — hopefully! — will be the real sweet spot.
Lecko Herro, or at least the characters in Meatloaf Castle, are on a quest for “normal.” I know this because that word is used four times in its 32 pages. “Normalcy” is also used once, tied for second place with the dreaded term “normie.” Ironically, the further the stories get from normal here, the better. For example, the highlight of this whole endeavor is “Polliwog the Spider Girl,” a three-pager drawn in gray shades with a pencil. Two acquaintances sit in a scenic lake while one explains how they learned to weave at a young age from apprenticing under a large arachnid. After they developed eight eyes, they decided it would be best to depart unless they grow any more spider characteristics. The short story ends with a weaving demonstration and the two characters serenely floating atop the water, covered in a web of vines and flower stems. Totally unique, tonally tranquil, like nothing else being created. Meatloaf Castle #1 feels like a NBA lottery pick stretching their calves and quads before the first big game. I can’t wait until the whistle blows. I loved this comic, but I love the idea of her next comic even more. I hope some stories are slightly extended in scope and in page length and there’s a little more mustard on it. After reading Meatloaf Castle several times I ultimately come away with this final thought: Lecko Herro has the potential to become your favorite cartoonist, or at the very least, your favorite cartoonist’s favorite cartoonist.
This is a comic made for bugs and newts. In it, everything is webs and petals as we follow a pointy nosed plant fairy sulk around, combating loneliness. Their partner has died, vanished, maybe never even existed, but it has not stopped this fairy from yearning for that companionship. The vague nature of the narrative is fittingly told by Mol in hazy graphite and the fairy’s inner monologue is laid in narration boxes with lettering that is accented by thorns. Everything in Extinction is spindly, opulent, and ugly (in Umberto Eco’s sense of the word — where the grotesque is infinitely appealing). Mol has an astounding feeling and sense of time and place as a cartoonist. She microscopically zooms in so much that the setting could be a gorgeously vast meadow or an overgrown backyard. The story itself could have taken place over a single hour or over a century. The page layouts and pacing could have Extinction placed in a dusty apothecary shoppe or in last week’s hip zinefest. It’s a timeless piece of work that somehow made me emotional that this fae denizen was depressed.
After grieving the loss of someone close and going about in a fog, the sprite tries to reset their thoughts and hibernate the pain away. Nothing takes. This brings us to what becomes the answer and the coolest part of this comic. Mol’s fairy transcribes their unhappiness onto the musical staff. The musical notes enchantingly resemble Miro curlies and mimic the twists and turns of the foliaged setting, but look unlike anything else here, completely alien. The creature hums their own tune — Mol has now included these musical compositions throughout the pages — as they find a deep hole in the ground. They die, seemingly content, then get munched on by dozens of creepy crawlies. The decomposition that is left behind looks like a spotted pinto bean which quickly turns into two seeds. They sprout together, camaraderie and intimacy once again intact, perhaps a prophecy fulfilled or one that was willed to happen. This is a comic made for bugs and newts, and for you, and for me.
My least favorite type of comic is where shapes turn into other shapes. You know what I’m talking about — these one-pagers where an egg turns into the sunset. I’m talking about Evan Cohen and the many other practitioners who can’t decide if they want to be cartoonists or hack graphic designers, making chud for the algorithmic maw. I find it so dull (no matter how gussied up it is with bright colors) and infantile, like they’re drawing themselves back into the womb. Then the womb becomes a lemon or some shit. Sooooo, after first skimming the pages of No Name and knowing nothing of Pinter, I came into this comic with apprehension. Little did I know that it was going to be full of short treatises and visual poems that are precise, confessional, and funny.
I went to a small liberal-art Christian college and knew a few people there who had anxiety disorders that were rooted in the fear of God and manifested in perfectionism. Couldn’t help but think of that as Pinter calls this “The God Issue” on the front cover and the pages inside are irreproachable. The maze titled “Help Re Find God” with Re on one side and God on the other with twirling intricacies inbetween made me laugh (I never finger-traced the line to see if there was a clear path, but I have a hunch) but the clear pinnacle of No Name is the five-page formalist banger “Questioning God.” The entire story is told in magic 8-ball back and forths that start physically large and under control. The author (or whoever) asks big, broad questions about the legitimacy of God and heaven and is met with quick affirmatives. As the asker turns things internally (“Am I doing life right?” “Will I be okay?”), the panels become smaller and more frequent, the answers much less clear cut. It feels despondent and hopeless and all you can do it laugh. Pinter gets that. In No Name there’s playfulness without frivolousness, seriousness without heavy-handedness. I could keep going, give or take a few “ness”s. Here’s a one-person anthology with a definite theme, but whether or not you’re a “believer” or the idea of God has any pull on you whatsoever is irrelevant. You just have to appreciate fringe media and find things slipping out of your grasp — and preconceived notions — rewarding.
In conclusion, I’m rooting for Speck. They’re very easy to root for! They all make comics that keep the cynicism at bay. I hope they continue at their own sustainable pace and become the next true comics vanguard of the West Coast. See you next month, I hope.
Questions, love letters and submissions to this column can be directed to @rjcaseywrites on Instagram.
The post Arrivals and Departures — January 2025 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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