Lately my four-year-old son has been asking some big questions. “Why was I born?” “Have you ever done anything I didn’t want you to do?” “How do animals with no tails know when they’re happy?” I’ve been panicking, scrambling for replies that make a lick of sense. But at the end of the day I do what I always do when I don’t have the answers. I turn to comics. Here are three I read this month that thankfully took my mind off my own futility.
I never thought I’d care so much for the well-being of a carrot-nosed Frosty, but here we are. SZNS by Chaia Startz mostly uses square 9 panel grids to tell the (almost — will certainly be later on — tragic) tale of a young, workaday snowman. He serves a despondent flower at the restaurant, is employed with a couple of lizards, and has to make a decision to keep a situationship snowballing or not with a rude hound dog. All of this and check on his ailing mother (who he lives with) and pick up a prescription for his sick cat (who’s not anthropomorphic). It’s hard to make characters stand out and be both immediately recognizable and memorable, especially in just a total of 16 zine pages. Startz nails it. And I don’t think there’s a deeper meaning to these arresting character designs. It just is. I find that a lot more palatable and entertaining than some shoddy laying-it-on-thick symbolism. My only hang-up is that digital coloring of this kind always takes me out of it a bit. I would really like to see what this comic looks like in black and white or just with a little bit of shading.
A morsel of mystery is hinted at when, at the beginning, the snowman sits at this desk and writes a letter to a leaf lobster that he may have had an old fling with. He rips the letter up and throws the pieces to the wind at the end to create some nice storytelling bookends. There’s also an important page near the finish that ties it all together where the snowman thinks about the dog and the lobster and then a ghost sits down next to him in bed. The page concludes with him trying to cheer up his mother whose behavior and physical deterioration is becoming startlingly pronounced and troubling. To make the choice of having the main character be the responsible straight man logically makes sense to counteract all the nuttiness going on around him. You really feel for the guy. Something is being set up here with all this narrative legwork. A lot — A LOT! — of stream-of-consciousness comics cross my path and it’s a load off as a reader when you trust that the artist has plans for you. Chaia Startz sure has a lot of potential. Like a snowman, I hope we don’t have to wait until next winter for issue #2.
Nona & Masha: Ingenious Rascals #2 by Rahel Suesskind
When you first enter an artist’s world in the second issue of a series, it can be handled in a couple of ways. Some cartoonists go with the slow burn approach and let you wander in the woods, hopefully amassing context clues and important beats along the way. Others latch onto your wrist and yank your arm out of your sleeve. Suesskind falls into the latter. Case in point: the comic starts with Nona — a pink, thick-thighed adventuress — dreaming about personified butts. Next to her is Masha, a pragmatic grizzly, holding an empty bottle. They are passed out on the ground, drunk from the night before, and being woken up by Kokoshnik, a tiny irritant named after elegant Russian headdresses. This is a fun gross-out buddy comedy at its core and Suesskind comes out of the Seinfeld/Hanselmann school where a razzing and rambunctious cast cause a mess and could face the consequences for their actions, but mostly they don’t.
What sets Nona & Masha miles and miles apart from 99% of all the other comics out there is the coloring. You’ve really got to see some of these pages for yourself. Every hue is glowing, lush, and textured. There is one sequence where it's all illuminated by campfire. The bear’s snout and birch trees are done in meticulous yellow and orange colored pencil. Those warm colors progressively fade out and blend into the cool blue, moonlit ground around them. These hazy daydreams and flashbacks are done in this pencil that is so obviously labor intensive, but the story as-is is embellished by water-color paints. With the water colors, Suesskind can provide a lived-in quality to denim shorts as well as an astounding ombre effect to setting-sun sky. Suesskind’s use of light and shading not only highlights her massive talent, but pushes the story along — color in service of narrative and narrative in service of color. It’s a minor miracle. In Nona & Masha, the jokes are funny and it’s an amusing tale. But when you’re talking about color, it deserves a ticker-tape parade.
The Shifting Ground by Joe Walsh
On page two, Joe Walsh gives you the thesis of his effectively ambitious comic. He writes, “For years it was a plan. Now it’s your daily life. Soon it will be memories.” The art in the panel is discombobulating, featuring Walsh’s face with two pairs of eyes. Waves and particles emanate like an aura off his shaky head, or perhaps they’re going the other way and pressuring down upon it like a vice. The Shifting Ground is part autobio and part transcendental philosophy treatise where no page looks quite like the last and the tone and style changes so frequently you, as a reader, can never get your feet firmly planted. I love it.
I’m a big fan of chaos in my art so the first story had me from the get. A drunken driver careens down a sidestreet, whacking a parked car at 60 miles per hour. This car was purchased by Walsh’s wife that very same day. Not only does it become immediately wrecked, but slides into Walsh’s car parked in front of it, totalling both of them. This somehow seamlessly syncs up with a meditation on movies and what art means more generally. It would be easy for someone to fall into the dire Darryl Cunningham mode here and draw half-assed stills from films, but Walsh pushes on every page, often straddling between figurative and abstract in bright purples, pinks, and yellows. We’re then led into a gym’s steam room where a man with “pain” tattooed over his eyebrow does a speedrun in aromatherapy before another dissertation on consistency of thought with cameos from everyone’s favorites: fish oil supplements, Dick Butkus, and creeping thoughts of death. Shifting Ground is a comic about the ability to change your mind and reconsider what your brain consumes and Walsh does this seemingly in real time on the page. Ultimately, Walsh posits that an artist, at the end of a project, ideally, should be a different person than the one who drew page one. I enjoyed every second I spent with these small snippets that I can only describe as Whitmanesque sequentials — meandering and exploratory and full of heart and brain in equal measure.
This has been the 20th installment of “Arrivals and Departures.” Thank you for holding onto comics with me. 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 — April 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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