Webcomic Wednesday: Gut Feelings (excerpt) by Leah Wishnia
Bloody, savage, vulgar, and extremely intelligent, this one-page preview of a short story from cartoonist Leah Wishnia’s forthcoming collection Gut Feelings deploys a powerful array of weapons in its quest to convey both physical and emotional violence – it’s just that some of them are silencer-equipped. Wishnia’s fierce, insistent line; the goggle-eyed madness of her character designs; the coarse and direct language and the artfully artless lettering with which it’s delivered; the sanguinary act at the sequence’s center – these are all readily apparent. Tougher to discern on the surface but no less crucial to the comic’s impact are Wishnia’s intrapanel layouts, heavy on dramatic diagonals that force the eye to dart across the page like a lightning bolt, like a knife fight. In the top panel, the attacker’s arms and legs, her knife, the nearby step, and the orientation of her looming head to her victim’s smaller one slash the panel from the upper right to the lower left. In the middle tier, the arm, the knife wound, and (most vitally) the gutter dividing the two panels at the page’s dead center angle back in the opposite direction. The climactic bottom panel is a discordant synthesis in which legs angle outward, arms are thrown inward, the look of terror on the victim’s face is offset by the prominence of the attacker’s grasping limbs, and the vaginal stomach wound and incongruously old “baby” form a V shape at the center of it all. Wishnia’s playing each panel like a drummer building a rhythm, and the rays radiating out from behind the victim in that final panel are the cymbal crash. The tale she’s telling is a tale of terror, but it’s a tale that lies in the telling just like any other.
Webcomic Wednesday: “Out of Skin” by Emily Carroll
By this point, harrowing new horror comics by Emily Carroll are a hallowed Halloween tradition. “Out of Skin,” her latest, is also her scariest, which is saying a great deal. Much of what you need to know about it you can gleam from the initial image, which you’ll find above: a sylvan setting, a sophisticated approach to color and lighting, cascading lettering that implies a certain graceful flow, and a pile of dead bodies that stops it like an axe to the skull. Reading “Out of Skin” is a matter of enduring several shocks of that sort – not jumpscares, but worse. They’re images that subvert and corrupt the material into which they’re inserted: Eyeballs rendered as circled asterisks, alien and uncommunicative; a friendly man and comfy forest converted to a butcher and his slaughterhouse by a red shift in the color palette; a cozy cabin transformed into a Boschian temple of flesh; a human face rendered as porous and violable as a blanket slung loosely over a bloodied bed. Scrolling through this comic is a dreadful experience, in the best sense of the word. “Out of Skin” will get under yours.
Webcomic Wednesday: “Diana in Ghost Arrow” by William Cardini
How much world can be worldbuilt in a single page? How much story can be storytold in eight panels? How much pathos and vengeance can be communicated in a name, a title, and two sentences of dialogue? How much alien and fantastical wonder and grandeur and horror can be suggested in a squiggly digital line and a greytone color palette? How much originality can be derived from combining the name of a Greek goddess (and a DC Comics superhero) with the make-up of David Bowie and the creature designs of Guy Davis? Tons and tons on all counts, if William Cardini’s “Diana in Ghost Arrow” is any indication. This elliptical fantasy one-pager is a marvel of narrative economy, successfully suggesting countless miles of space around it and untold years of story before and after it. I’d love to see what an entire collection of such single-serving short stories could do.
Webcomic Wednesday: “Andy” by Sophie Franz
Like the subject of last week’s Webcomic Wednesday column, Ben Catmull's Monster Parade, Sophie Franz’s “Andy” employs the liminal physiology of a whale (or of something whale-ish), alien yet mammalian, as its monster. And like Junji Ito's Uzumaki, one of the scariest and most influential horror comics of all time, it treats the shape of a spiral, with all its implications of infinitude and obsession, as a source and cause of madness and horror. And like the work of Al Columbia, it employs pipecleaner arms and white gloves of old cartoon characters as a signifier of demented, wholly inappropriate, menacing good cheer. And like Simon Hanselmann’s “Megg’s Depression,” it utilizes the supernatural and the unexplained to visually crowd out the page as a way of expressing the uncontrollable dominance of disordered thoughts. And its rounded-off, buoyant character designs, its lush and luminous hatching, and its incongruous sensuality (the mother’s hair and rear are unnecessarily attractive, and that adolescent boy is leaking fluids everywhere) help combine all those elements into something all its own. It’s boisterous and unnerving work.
Webcomic Wednesday: First Year Healthy by Michael DeForge
A horror comic of exuberant restraint, Michael DeForge’s First Year Healthy is either a subtle story about violent mental illness, or an even more subtle story about lycanthropy. That it’s difficult to tell for sure is where the restraint comes in. The nameless narrator refers to a hospital stay following an “episode” that made her notorious in town and prevented her brothers from allowing her to visit their families; people around her slowly build up a habit of dying violently and disappearing; a massive cat-like creature with a mouthful of fangs and a mane like the blazing sun prowls around the periphery of the story for ages before entering into the narrative in a dramatic way during its finale. Visual clues – a second cat, smaller and silhouetted; the shadowy shapes of the cat’s mane and tale extending out from the woman’s distinctive hairstyle as though her head itself is the cat’s body – point to a connection between the woman and the cat beyond the folktale she describes, but how literally are we to take it? I’m not convinced it matters. The important thing is that this woman’s life has a dangerous presence embedded deep within it, and the drizzle of workaday detail she pours atop it – her job, her sex life, her living arrangements – cannot keep it down for much longer than the titular 365 days.
None of this speaks to the way the thing is drawn, really, and that’s where the exuberance comes in. As befits his side career as an artist for Adventure Time, DeForge’s work is highly…stylized seems both too broad and too specific a descriptor, but he draws people, animals, and plants with a near-total disregard for verisimilitude, or even for evoking some abstracted or poetic essence-of-person-animal-or-plant. It’s like he gets started, draws until he’s satisfied with whatever shape his pen has conjured, says “okay, that’s human hair” and calls it a day; his color choices are equally unpredictable and unmoored. When you place these far-out visuals in a story this muted, with a narrator this flat-affect, in a format this rigid – a series of stand-alone one-page illustrations, captioned with typewritten text – the contrast is vivid, memorable, slightly maddening. In other words, perfect for a horror story like this, though it takes a certain kind of vision to see it and make it so.
Webcomic Wednesday: Illegal Batman by Ed Pinsent
Deconstructions of the Batman, even excellent ones, are nothing new, but I’ve never seen anyone or anything break it down to the molecular level and reassemble it into a wondrous and haunting new form the way Ed Pinsent does in Illegal Batman. Or should I say the way Ed Pinsent did—though it’s now available for viewing and download on his website, Pinsent made this comic in the pre-Internet, extremely Batman-heavy days of 1989. And yes, it’s as unauthorized as a bootleg Batman t-shirt from roughly the same time period, but you’d have to be a very, very strange reader to mistake it for the real thing. In Pinsent’s hands, and in his warm and shaky black-and-white line, Batman becomes an avatar of inaction – he takes days on end to do nothing but think about each clue before he acts – and un-action – he arrives at the scene of the crime, eventually, by transmitting himself through the air as a sort of thoughtform-cum-lightbeam, the usual physical process of being Batman completely eschewed. His arrival at the criminals’ castle headquarters is in the form of a graffiti-like mural they unsuccessfully attempt to efface from the walls; when he finally materializes physically, his body has somehow been painted white, and he must lurk in the shadows to regain his customary dark coloring. He’s here to save a young mother who, the criminals have informed him via a VHS tape mailed to the Batcave, has had her face carved off in front of her confused children for reasons apparent to no one. But Batman sees through the ruse, and reveals to the woman that she is in fact whole and intact. She asks him for answers, asks what his happening, asks where her children are, and his non-response is a bullet to the heart of the Batman mythos: “The damage is done. We cannot solve our sadness. Remember that…We cannot solve our sadness.” And yet, when he and the woman re-materialize in the Batcave after dodging a days-long siege by an army of “strong-arms” and briefly becoming a constellation in the night sky, her children – now labeled “his children” for reasons unknown – are with them. For all the tough-guy posturing and grim'n'gritty iconography of the original, Illegal Batman reveals the central tenets of the Dark Knight idea: a gossamer fantasy of the possibility of justice, a form of contemplative comfort in a world that too often provides no comfort of its own.
(via Dylan Horrocks)
Webcomic Wednesday: Coyote Doggirl by Lisa Hanawalt
My favorite narratives of pursuit are purposeless. We don’t know why the pursuer is chasing the pursued, we just know the fact of it, and we’re counted on to create the story and the stakes ourselves. “The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed”: This is the best sentence Stephen King ever wrote, despite its status as the lede to the most bloated and self-indulgent project of his career, because it’s a perfect black diamond of story, a Goldilocks quantity of information. The who and the where and the what are sufficient. The when and the why is irrelevant.
Lisa Hanawalt’s Coyote Doggirl, currently being serialized weekly on her tumblr, embraces this approach not out of King’s (uncharacteristic, to say the effing least) desire for economy, but out of her own very characteristic desire for absurdity. Hanawalt loves drawing horses and dogs, anthropomorphized and otherwise; loves drawing oddly and incongruously specific items of clothing; loves exploring the at-times grotesque intimacy of the relationship between human and animal; loves watercolors; loves evoking a sensation of suppressed but still detectable terror and discomfort under the surface. In creating a purposeless pursuit, in having her titular character announce with hilarious unspecificity “We are being pursued by guys” and then take off on horseback across the wilderness, she’s created a skeleton on which her interests can be draped like muscle and skin and a soft pelt of fur. There’s a touch of the weird-West to it, maybe via Sammy Harkham’s Black Death (there’s some very similar imagery in there), but it’s not really a genre exercise, it’s the use of a genre to exercise something personal, something innate.
(via bowielovesbeyonce)
Webcomic Wednesday: The Long Journey by Boulet
Empty spectacle? Yeah, probably, but no less spectacular for that. The Long Journey is a long webcomic by French sensation Boulet – and I mean long literally. It’s an enormous continuously scrolling strip, the vertical progress of which is mostly dictated by the author-avatar’s freefall through a wide variety of different subterranean environments. The thing goes on and on, and the physical sensation of holding the down arrow or clicking or swiping your way through it – revealing, say, a forest of enormous mushrooms, or an underground Nazi stronghold, or a Devil so large that his facial features register more as geological phenomena – is a big part of the fun. I call it “empty” because that sense of “ooh, neat!” is about as high as the strip aims – the pleasure comes almost entirely from Boulet’s exceedingly lovely pixel art (particularly the glowy colors) and the way the scroll format reveals it bit by bit, rather than any sense that author or reader has grown or changed between the start of the plummet and the end of it. It’s just for fun, basically. But as a “hey you gotta check this out” diversion, it’s as solid an argument as I’ve seen for the vitality of webcomics’ infinite canvas.
Webcomic Wednesday: “About the Author” by Pete Toms
Comics is ready-built for repetition. Its basic unit of composition, the panel, lends itself to arrangement in neat grids, a layout that all but begs the reader to notice that she’s seeing identical units. You can fill those panels with whatever you want, but when you fill it with the same basic thing over and over again, the effect is confrontationally direct. Its cinematic equivalent is the long take, but that’s an immersive technique, one that can lull and soothe as well as disconcert. Filling a page with a repeated image is a way to force a reader to look at the same thing for an extended period of time, yes, but that’s where the similarities end. This has a rhythm, and it’s the rhythm of smacking someone on the forehead repeatedly.
Pete Toms is best known for an intriguing and engaging combination of colorful psychedelia, comedic surrealism, genre inflections, and deadpan humor (which comes through in his flat-affect character designs as much as anywhere else). In “About the Author,” however, the only color is red, and if you’re laughing it’s as a pressure release. The title, and the direct (though sightless) gaze of the classical bust that passes for self-portraiture, force you to grapple with the idea that the person who made this comic is showing you something about himself, and that that something is best expressed by orifices that gush blood. You’re hit with this six consecutive times, like you’re a bad kid being forced to write it repeatedly on the blackboard as punishment. Toms is enough of a jokester that it’s difficult to know how seriously we’re to take this thing — certainly it’s over the top — but even if it’s exaggerated for effect, it’s still a striking blend of the classically uncanny device of the bleeding statue, the awkward convention of the “about the author” page, the ability of autobiographical comics to be disconcertingly revealing, and comics’ natural knack for using repetition to batter the reader with a single idea. It’s four very specific things overlaid on top of one another, producing a very specific and very powerful horror comic. It holds your gaze and bleeds on it.
