Webcomic Wednesday: The art and comics of Lala Albert
The third eye is a symbol of enlightenment, usually. After all, it’s a new opening through which to literally let light in. With more eyes to see, you can see more – that’s how the symbolism is supposed to work. But in the context of fantastic fiction, the act of seeing can carry a negative charge. If seeing is believing, what happens to the seer when confronted with the unbelievable? Dave Bowman passing through the stargate. Danny Torrance rounding the corner and discovering two little girls. Bran Stark forced into contemplating the enemy when he’s not even up to the task of walking. Sally Hardesty tied to a chair and forced to witness a nightmarish tableau of cackling cannibals gathered together in a sick Norman Rockwell pastiche. Indiana Jones and Marion Ravenwood forcing their eyes shut lest they be annihilated by the glory of God. These characters are given a glimpse of some true thing, and in some cases they’re even better off for. But their vision comes at a cost.
In her illustrations and comics, Lala Albert has been poking the third eye for years. Her art style can change, depending on the nature of the project at hand – from scratchy, murky, horror-tinged black and white work to lush, glowing, sensual sci-fi; from bold stand-alone images to dense and demanding narratives; from elegant eroticism to manic mark-making. But two elements remain near-constant presences. The first is a predilection for curvilinear forms that suggest a wavy world where geometry is dominated not by straight lines but by s-shapes, often augmented by a ripple-like pattern of image repetition. And the second is the third eye – unfurling in the center of the forehead, it is the center of her work. It can spread across the faces of her alien characters like a lesion, it can riddle them like holes in a lotus pod, it can bifurcate like an amoeba, it can serve as the vanguard of an entire new face beneath the one we’ve already seen, it can contain multiple irises or none at all, it can be radiant and serene or alive with anger. She comes at the image from a variety of angles, but she arrives in the same place.
Which is not to say she’s a one-trick pony. Indeed, just the opposite: Her obvious conviction that the third eye is saying something important comes with a sense of duty to find a variety of ways to say it. Albert’s sheer bloody-minded willingness to return to this image again and again suggest that it’s not a crutch but a compulsion. “I use the third eye in my work because of what it feels like to me," she says. "I’m not necessarily thinking of the origin or religious/spiritual meaning. I draw it because I feel like it needs to be there and I can create my own mythologies around it.” The eyes of Lala Albert exist because they must, because there are beautiful and terrible things out there to be seen and this is how you see them. What happens to the seer is a question left open, like an eye.
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: “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 - Monster Parade by Ben Catmull
Previously released in print by Fantagraphics and now available to read for free in its entirety on Study Group, Ben Catmull’s Monster Parade is, indeed, a procession of of monstrousness on display for your enjoyment. That’s part of its structure – it consists of three separate and very different vignettes, so it feels like multiple comics in one – and its subject matter – there are an awful lot of different monsters in there. But most impressive is the variety in its emotional tone, a parade of unlikely and unexpected emotional effects all derived from the same basic visual vocabulary of strange creatures. The first story, sampled above and returned to as a sort of framing device throughout the comic, is all about scale and awe, with enormous beasts that operate on the level of weather phenomena. Imagine Maurice Sendak illustrating that one creature from The Mist and you’ve got the blend of whimsy, awe, and menace that Catmull has in mind.
The second story scales way down, taking place primarily in a single old-fashioned train compartment, where a well-dressed gentleman is trapped with a boorish fellow passenger by an off-screen monster rampage in other cars that prevents him from leaving the compartment. The trick here is using comedic timing, the slow build of the passenger’s increasing rudeness and disgustingness, to lead not to a punchline but to the appearance of the monster itself. You’re primed to laugh, and maybe you do, but it winds up being a gallows chuckle.
The final story, and to me the real knockout of the bunch, is a faux travel guide to a mysterious town named in an indecipherable alphabet, a town in which monsters have woven themselves into every aspect of life. Some are treated as being as common and harmless as squirrels. Some are vital to tourist attractions. Some go unnoticed. Some maraud through the streets, slaughtering indiscriminately. Some have been catalogued and thus rendered safe; others are “unexplained,” as is the reason why they’re unexplained but all those other creatures are things the townsfolk have gotten to the bottom of. “No one crosses the river,” the story intones at last, revealing that beyond the town’s borders even more terrifying creatures lurk. Blending goofy comedy, Gashlycrumb Tinies-esque gothy irony, raw monster-making chops, and subtle don’t-look-now chills to create a nowhere-land that makes the world a slightly more dangerous and disturbing place for having been drawn into existence.
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 art of Heather Benjamin
Even by the lax standards of a blog given to posting art from the pulp end of the spectrum, finding even remotely SFW Heather Benjamin art is not just a challenge, it’s an adventure. The title of her self-published solo-anthology zine series, Sad Sex, says it all, really. Benjamin uses the dueling visual vocabularies of pin-up art and horror illustration to craft images that are confrontationally graphic in how they address the physically and emotionally unpleasant parts of sex. Benjamin’s women (and they’re almost always women) often scream, shriek, or otherwise contort their faces into rictuses of agony or outrage. They gush blood from every conceivable orifice. They sprout wild, painstakingly delineated medusa-like tendrils of hair from their heads, and grow forests of it so thick on the parts of their bodies society deems they should shave that it could pass for clothing or fur. Chains, vines, lace, and in recent work long stalks that extend the characters’ eyeballs out from their sockets further reinforce the impression that everything Benjamin draws is sprouting – being stretched, pulled, and extruded far beyond rational lengths. But as you can see from the rare piece of commercial illustration that leads this post – the opulent, all but shiny portrait of a smiling woman and a baby jaguar – an ability to draw gorgeously underpins every bit of grotesquerie Benjamin conjures up. The memorably menacing imagery she produces are deliberate choices, a rejoinder to women’s roles in both erotic and horror illustration. Whether Benjamin’s women are smiling with their eyes or oozing blood and tears from them, those eyes are alive – with desire, with pride, with rage, with pain, with a whole variety of emotions, yes, but those emotions are their own. Even at their most abject and abused, their existence is theirs, not anyone else’s. Not even yours.
Benjamin’s most recent collection, Exorcise Book, is available for purchase. Don’t say you weren’t warned.
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