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arecomicsevengood · 8 months

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TRIP REPORT: SPX 2023

I went down to the Small Press Expo in Bethesda, Maryland this past Sunday. While I lived in Baltimore for a number of years, and it was essentially a local show, this is the first time I've been since moving to Philly in 2019. It took a year (or two?) off on account of COVID. I don't have much to say about the show itself, I enjoyed walking around talking to people, I probably didn't see all the stuff I would've liked, I'm not really in a good place to judge trends. I missed some people I would've liked to have met, like Drew Lerman, who left before I got there. He won an Ignatz though, and good for him. I do believe that the thing about SPX and the Ignatzes is that everyone essentially occupies very different spheres of interest and sets of influences. As I walked around, seeing little cards on people's comics saying they were nominated for an Ignatz, I would ask them if they had heard of or were familiar with the thing that won, they almost never were.

At the one panel discussion I attended, about drawing detailed backgrounds as a way of of establishing worldbuilding, Rosemary Valero-O'Connell cited Taiyo Matsumoto's approach as an influence, and as I sat in the audience thinking "Yes! Let's talk more about that!" everyone else on stage, quite reasonably, talked about their own influences instead - which for Daria Tessler, who I came to see, included Mark Beyer and Jim Woodring. The panel was generally good and interesting, and it's not meant as a slight to the moderator Rob Clough to point out that the best questions came during the Q+A from the audience. One member asked the question, how do you handle tonal shifts when you are using detailed visuals for plot purposes, and everyone agreed that that at emotional climaxes or at moments of more interiority they reduce the level of background detail.

Daria Tessler was the artist I was most excited to meet of anyone at the fest. Since my local shop, Partners And Son, is on top of it, I had already read her newest comic, volume 2 of Cagelessness, which absolutely rules, and so I had to shell out the big bucks for a copy of her fully-silkscreened book Dust, that uses multi-color collages as a backdrop for the cowboy characters who, in Cagelessness, move through ornately designed drawn worlds. Her work is beautiful, another high point of the panel discussion was her talking about how Marc Bell calls the tiny details cluttering up the backgrounds of his comics "chicken fat," and while Clough cited the term as originating from Will Elder, Tessler described chicken fat as "what you put in the soup to make it taste better, if you're not vegan," perfectly capturing what makes these artists work such a delicious meal for the eyes.

A similar "I already have all of these" experience was behind my purchase of Tales Of Old Snake Creek, by Drew Lerman, which collects his anthology contributions from recent years and adds watercolor to them. I love these comics in their original formats but I'm not going to say no to the convenience of this, which is also printed at a size larger than the digests in which some things ran.

Shout-out to Bread Tarleton, who pointed out to me the Paradise Systems table, where everything looked good and lavish, but what I picked up was Cry by Yan Cong. I believe Paradise Systems to be a reprinter of self-published comics from China. Cry features cartoony figures in a charcoal textured world, and follows a man having a sexual experience with a prostitute with a weird visual punchline.

Adam Szym directed me to the Strangers Fanzine table, where I picked up Shony Glassware 2 by Manning Coe, which is in some ways probably the sort of zine a lot of people go to SPX to get. Pretty funny stuff, maybe Ben Jones influenced, by a 26-year-old who lives in Osaka. Drawing himself in a Beat Happening shirt but with a bio where he talks about listening to 100 Gecs, there is a definite vibe at work here and while I don't remember the price point of this one I feel like it had to be cheap because it's that kind of comic. If you're ordering the new printing of Bhanu Pratap's Dear Mother from Strangers and want something else that's not too genre-y make sure you throw this in there.

Adam Szym's Their Use Continues is a horror short about the current trend towards reviving dead actors as CGI phantoms in movies currently in the news. Feels nice and relevant, I think I would've liked this to be a little bit bigger (it's printed digest size) and hi-res. Adam uses some digital collage elements for backgrounds and borders that I mostly felt was making the book smaller and fuzzier still.

I nonetheless liked it better than another horror comic I picked up, issue 1 ofJenna Cha and Lonnie Nadler's The Sickness, published by Uncivilized. Both people are more mainstream-comics, which I think is fine, but this does something I really associate with the dumbest kind of attitude that can be present in horror stuff, the kind of tonal miscalculation the comics I like avoid: Presenting a mid-century American setting where characters nonetheless are using a high degree of vulgar language, of a sort that would be stylized and off-putting if it were depicting the modern era but really just completely pulls me out of something set in the past. The second printing changes the color palette on the cover in a way that makes the drawing better, but this is not the sort of thing I would recommend anyone track down, which is sad, because it's likely far more readily available than anything I liked.

Tim Lane's Happy Hour In America 1, from a few years ago, was available at the Fantagraphics table. Presumably because Tim was signing, but I never saw him. I haven't read the big books collecting his short stories, but I like his contributions to anthologies. He's a guy who can really draw, in a way that you don't often see at small press shows, or that feels more appreciated by a mainstream-comics crowd. If his stories aren't as psychotically involved on a plot level as Mack White, he's nonetheless interesting as like a Gen X'er talking about American masculinity and what animates it. I would gladly read it in single issue comics format, though I missed these the first time because it wasn't what I felt I was in the mood for.

Another thing I picked up as a half-off copy of David B's Incidents In The Night, volume 2, from Uncivilized. I think volume 1 did pretty well, and is now sold out, but now that that's unavailable, volume 2 is a harder sell. David B is one of those dudes, like Joann Sfar or Christophe Blain, that got the big bookstore push like fifteen years ago but now no one wants to put out their books in the U.S. David B is also a guy, like GIpi, who had a comic put out by the Ignatz line Fantagraphics had. I bought issue 1 of Babel at the time and didn't care for it, and would've told you I didn't iike David B's work. But lately I've been tracking down books in the Ignatz line I skipped the first time (along with the First Second books of Gipi and Sfar from roughly the same time) and enjoying them, and this fits into that trend as well. A pretty involving plot, involving booksellers, the occult, criminal organizations. I both want to track down a copy of volume 1 and am frustrated that the volume 3 advertised at the end of this book was never translated into English.

Yasmeen Abediford's Death Bloom won an Ignatz, for best minicomic. All of the Ignatz awards are really ill-defined categories, and this is one is a $25 risograph thing, which to me seems like it should exist in a different category than cheapo xerox stuff, but whatever. Anyway, I believe Abediford will also be in the new issue of Freak, which I have seen Instagram posts indicating contributors got an advance copy of but have yet to be for sale online. Abediford is from the Bay Area, but this book was printed by Lucky Pocket Press, based in Baltimore, but from people who either moved there or didn't have the press going until after I left there. They sold me the comic in a little printed bag, which included a family tree for their little mascot guy, citing the "onion peow guy" as "(father, deceased)" and "(comics legend)," which is interesting to me insofar as I don't think of any of the Peow stuff as being interesting to me, though I'm happy it found its audience and made a mark. I don't really get this one either but whatever, I'll reread it tos ee if my opinion changes.

I would also put the output of publisher Silver Sprocket in a similar category to Peow - Not for me, seems like it's for younger people, in a way that dominates SPX as it's currently constituted. I have the deepest sympathies for them not being able to dominate SPX this year though, due to a misplaced/inaccessible pallet of books that they didn't get until halfway through Sunday. They had flown out Leo Fox from England, to debut his new book Prokaryote Season. I had seen Fox's stuff on Twitter last year and thought it looked good/interesting, but was also frustrated by the fact that he had apparently released a comic that was only for sale for 24 hours - maybe a way to create demand so that people actually order a thing, but in an artificial scarcity kind of way I resent. Anyway, I bought one of his self-published things, My Body Unspooling, and yeah I think it looks really cool and interesting, though the approach taken, a sort of simple narrative about the notion of the self rather than something that seems interested in having characters interact is again the kind of trend I blanch at in work made by people younger than me. I nonetheless liked the comic, and thought it was cool, and am going to read his book soon.

I bought issue 9 of Mike Centeno's Futile from the Radiator Comics distro booth. It is explicitly labeled as No Previous Readin' Necessary, so while there were two older issues of Futile at the table, printed at smaller dimensions, I didn't pick them up. This was cool, a mostly black and white (but with pages in the middle in color) comic about a musician taking mushrooms . It looks great on a flipthrough, though Audra Stang, working the table, tried to close the center-spread of my flipthrough so that the burst into full-color I was admiring didn't spoil the story's progression and surprises. Format and cartooning kinda reminded me of Nate Doyle's series Crooked Teeth. (Nate had a larger-formatted barbarian fantasy comic available from Strangers Fanzine, which I passed on.)

I also bought Beth Heinly's Girls Named Meghan from her, though Heinly is Philly-based and I've had plenty of chances to pick it up before. It's a memoir of her teenage years, growing up in Delaware County, which is where I went to high school, and the friendships she had that veered into rebellion and her apprehensions about being around people more "troubled" than she was. It is basically black and white but there's little red-pencil edits throughout, like maybe the wrong PDF was sent to the printer or something, sourced from a file where she was noting what she wanted to fix. I don't think of the other copies I have seen were like this though. Again, I think this is the sort of self-published autobio thing that many people go to SPX to find. I can see the places there this could be stronger or more impactful but there is still a fine sense for who all the characters were, and what the era was like.

I got a few other things but this is all I have read so far, at this moment when I felt like writing. Andrew White gave me a copy of the new Yearly, and a name I recognized from his writing for The Comics Journal, Henry Chamberlain, gave me a copy of his book George's Run, a biography of a Twilight Zone writer published by Rutgers University Press. I also got issue 3 of a comic called Cat Scratch Fever by a woman named Emily Zullo, and Soumya Dhulekar's Flash Valley. Both of these are in the classic digest sized minicomic format with black and white throughout, though Dhulekar opted for a a cardstock cover. This is the sort of thing I am most happy to buy from a stranger at a show and basically not even care about the quality as long as the price is right, though of course the price for both of these is higher than it used to be. I also bought and haven't yet read Leo Fox's Prokaryote Season, the theoretical "book of the show," although another contender for that title, the collection of Liam Cobb comics, What Awaits Them, looked great but I will pick it up when it comes into my local shop.

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arecomicsevengood · 9 months

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River's Edgelords And Ladies: Kyoko Okazaki's Burning Bodies

I wrote a piece for The Comics Journal about the manga of Kyoko Okazaki, Keanu Reeves' years as a teen idol, Dennis Cooper, self-described hot girls, and how people didn't talk about capitalism so much ten years ago, all of this in the context of a review of Kyoko Okazaki's newly released River's Edge.

Helen Chazan also has a review up of River's Edge today, running in parallel, and her piece might be the better one to read first if you haven't already read the manga. Both of us liked the book a lot, as did the hosts of the Thick Lines podcast, check it out.

#Kyoko Okazaki

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arecomicsevengood · 10 months

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James Collier’s THE LONESOME SHEPHERD

It’s pretty rare that artists reach out to me about work they’re putting out, but James Collier sent me a PDF copy of his book The Lonesome Shepherd, recently published by the Wig Shop Web Shop. It fits in pretty well with my tastes: Alt-comics cartooning of a type situated very close to Sammy Harkham, Antoine Cosse, Connor Willumsen, Jesse McManus. Pages that feel open, figures that feel like shapes, avoiding a dismissive descriptor of “cute” because of its willingness to be actually beautiful, in its depiction of the natural world. The reader explores the world Collier has designed, the tone’s a little melancholy, but funny too. I am doing an incredibly lazy job writing about it because well-crafted, attractive comics of this stripe should sell themselves to the Comics Journal/Bubbles audience just on the basis of they’re being awareness of them, and so I am simply trying to pass along that awareness.

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arecomicsevengood · 10 months

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Issue 309 of The Comics Journal should be in stores now. Gary Groth interviews Annie Koyama, John Porcellino interviews Ines Estrada, Kristy Valenti interviews Hyena Hell, Helen Chazan writes about Saga, and I write about Nick Drnaso’s work in it. Features a great Jesse Jacobs cover and sketchbook drawings by Henriette Valium.

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arecomicsevengood · 10 months

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THREE UNCIVILIZED BOOKS

If you ever come to visit me in Philadelphia, particularly if you are a visual artist of some stripe, odds are good I will invite you to visit the Barnes Foundation, home of some very beautiful paintings. A few months ago, I was with a cartoonist, looking at a piece by Pascin, maybe overhearing a docent providing commentary to a tour group, when the idiotic commentary of my own mind said to myself: Hey, didn’t a cartoonist do a cartoon biography of Pascin? Maybe there are copies in the gift shop. There were not, but once I was at home and googled I confirmed the cartoonist in question was Joann Sfar, and this book was published in the U.S. by Uncivilized Books. Months later, the publisher had a big sale on their website, and now that book is in my hands.

The comics biography is a much-maligned genre, for an number of reasons. One particularly egregious offense is telling the story of an artist via a style that gives no indication the storyteller cares about or understands the artist’s work. This, however, is a gorgeously drawn book. The affinity between Sfar feels for Pascin is clear, though pastiche is not attempted, there is still an understanding of the role of brushstroke, and characters struggle with the questions of art in a way that remains unsettled for the cartoonist. There’s a bit late in the book where two painters are discussing drawing from models, and how the goal is to capture the life and motion of a figure so it’s not like a photograph, and has a richness to it, but not to approach this goal the way the cubists go about it. It feels like this is a part of Sfar’s concerns as well, and he is choosing the looseness of a sketchbook approach, with varying materials, as his own way of achieving this aim. The page layouts are sketchbook-style, lacking the sense of forward momentum you get from a grid, but remaining well-timed in their progression across a sequence. To the best of my knowledge, it’s the only book of Sfar’s in English that’s in black and white, and we get to see his decisions unencumbered by color, as he focuses on textures, the body, nudity, eroticism.

The traditional structure of the biography is dispensed with, in favor of telling little stories that work as comics. There isn’t a narrative of cause and effect, of rising and falling fortunes. Rather, a man is who he is, throughout his entire life, and different scenarios illuminate what that means. Sfar really focuses on Pascin as a dude who is either having sex or is drawing women as a way of gratifying himself as an alternative to fucking. In doing so, he turns Pascin into a character, rather than a node in historical time. I am unsure if I favor this approach because I’m a fatalist about human nature and don’t think people change that much over a lifetime, or if I just think that’s what works for comedy and I prefer comedy to drama. Most likely these things are interconnected.

This seems to me the right approach for Pascin, both because a comic works well with cartoon characters as its subject, and because of what it is to be a painter. It has occurred to me, walking through the Barnes, or other museums, that if you are seeing actual paintings, you are seeing them absent a grand historical narrative. An art book, filled with reproductions, can break an oeuvre down into periods, showing examples of each. But in a museum, you take what’s on offer, whether it be sketches or a handful of finished works. It is the rare museum that features enough of an artist’s work a viewer can take in the grand sweep of a career. This offers its own correspondence to what it is to be a person: how a lover has a different perspective on their partner than a close friend would, and parents, coworkers, and casual acquaintances have their own individual takes. While a biographer might seek a full compendium of everyone’s shifting opinions, over a period of years, all this will lead a reader to is the inconclusive conclusion that such-and-such was “a complicated guy.” A portrait of the artist as someone primarily interested in women and their work might not satisfy a biographer, but it is not necessarily inaccurate.

Other artists (Soutine, Hemingway) get walk-on roles and they’re all presented as coherent characters - possessing a degree of psychological depth, but defined by their actions, and usually driven by base desires. Juxtaposing them against each other allows for themes to emerge without the book needing to lapse into narrative captions offering didactic explanations. There’s an episodic structure, and I enjoyed it from the beginning, but with each new chapter I felt like the book was getting better, cutting closer to its subject. It’s a very satisfying reading experience, and made me interested in reading more of Sfar’s work.

Another book I purchased from Uncivilized during this recent sale was Jesse McManus’ The Whistling Factory. Jesse recently gave a talk for the New York Comics Symposium I appreciated for a number of reasons. He is about the same age as I am, and he touched on having read as a kid some of the same black and white kids comics I wrote about in my article for issue 2 of But Is It… Comic Aht. (I still have copies available, if anyone’s interested.) While writing that piece, I had noted that there were similarities between how Jesse approached the cartooned shape and the shadows it cast and Scott Roberts did in his comic Patty Cake. My whole reason for writing that piece was that I feel like these comics were really under-discussed, because despite the nostalgic tendency in comics criticism, that primarily benefits superhero comics, and the comics I was talking about were never that widely-read. Jesse was totally disinterested in superhero comics that get discussed ad nauseam, and his perspective both feels unique to him and familiar to me.

Jesse McManus diverges from me by being very good at drawing, and he goes beyond a lot of people by making a system out of following the logic of squash-and-stretch, taking the Fort Thunder tendency to focus on characters moving in space and applying it to this Kricfalusi-derived shifting of forms. The interest in images-for-their-own-sake abuts an interest in language-for-its-own-sake, and they work in concert to create something just a few feet beyond the fathomable. So many comics are interesting because you can see the artist thinking on paper, but in McManus you see someone who’s been drawing so long that the brain is on paper so fully it feels like the unconscious mind is behind what we’re seeing. Objects seem to flow in and out of being symbols, with new meanings dependent on the context. If Uncivilized feels like a weird publisher because it’s not clear what exactly they publish, besides feeling like the farm league for D+Q, these books seem to take the name of the company literally, in very different ways, to put to paper things that feel half-feral, untamed.

The subject matter of the half-feral arises in Sam Alden’s New Construction, but in order to talk about what makes Alden’s comics interesting to me, I’ve gotta briefly digress: Recently I reread the first two issues of Adrian Tomine’s Optic Nerve, which Drawn And Quarterly published in 1995. In high school, I borrowed a friend’s copy of Sleepwalk, which collected the first four issues of the series, and enjoyed it, vaguely intending to buy my own copy of the collection eventually, and buying all the issues that would later be collected as Summer Blonde. Now I’ve got the first two issues, and I might as well try to find issues 3 and 4 so I can have a complete set of the series in single issue format.

By and large, when I read comics from the 1990s for the first time decades later, there are two reactions I have: “Wow, they don’t make comics like that any more. That was so good, and so strong, in a way I can’t imagine anyone attempting that now” - these are, generally speaking, works that are “edgy” or transgressive in some way: Seven Miles A Second, for instance, or Nurture The Devil (still trying to track down issue 2 of this) or Villa Of The Mysteries. Julie Doucet’s Dirty Plotte fits this bill. Paul Pope was likely not trying to be transgressive, but his P-City Parade is still impressive for how much of a game-changer its approach to visual storytelling would’ve been at the time, and has stuff in it any editorial or self-censoring impulse would blanch at today. In comparison, work that feels inoffensive often feels sort of boring in a way it likely didn’t at the time: The comics of Michael Dougan, say, which I tracked down after he died, are well-told, but also seem like they benefitted from there not being as much competition at the time. Interestingly, this perspective feels like the opposite of what most people mean when they say work “didn’t age well.” I am not sure if my tastes reflect a hunger for the transgressive for its own sake as much as I am interested in how work reflects the time of its creation, and I remember the nineties well enough to know people were not so well-manicured in their self-presentation as they are in the time of social media. (Again, these things are likely interconnected.)

When I read Optic Nerve, it strikes me as work I liked when I was younger, that was made by someone who was themselves quite young at the time of its creation. One thing that makes the single issues interesting is the letter columns. Tomine was known for having good ones, as his work attracted a special type of weirdo that was comfortable offering their unprompted criticism to strangers. This is another aspect of the nineties which has fallen out of favor: All the criticism seems offered in earnest good faith, as opposed to today, where if someone tags a creator on social media when they’re offering criticism they will be called out for being a dick, people largely thinking of audience feedback within terms of a praise or trolling binary. James Kochalka has a letter in issue two, offering a take on Tomine’s work which has aged like wine, and I will reproduce it in in full:

…I’ve been enjoying your comics, but I’m beginning to find the critics tiresome. To me, it seems like you’re not particularly wise beyond your years. Your comics seem very much like they were written by a young person. You don’t seem particularly extra knowledgeable about what makes human beings tick… To me it seems like you’re as good you are simply because you work very hard at it. Sometimes it almost seems like you’re trying too hard, especially in Optic Nerve #1. It’s drawn with such rigidity. The pictures seem like they’re made almost entirely of vertical lines, with minor horizonals and very inconsequential diagonals and curves. To me it seems like the stories don’t automatically call to be treated in this manner. Rather, it seems like your desire to appear “professional” is having a restricting effect on your drawing hand. Please, flow freely into your work.

Tom Kaczynski, the future publisher of Uncivilized Books, also writes in, saying “…I did find this issue to be bit awkward in execution. Some panels, it seemed, you were unsure of. I don’t know what is causing it. In the past, you seemed to have certain confidence in the line of the brush (especially on the “Smoke” story) which seems to be repressed under the tightened inks.”

I bring up these things to note that Sam Alden, similarly, was perceived as a young cartoonist for a minute there, and his stories in New Construction seem very well-observed in capturing young adults and subculture. He would’ve been a bit older than Tomine was. (These letters were written in 1995, when Tomine would’ve been 21, the stories in New Construction would’ve been made, I think, when Alden was in his late twenties.) Tomine’s work is about young people as somewhat repressed, lonely, aching to find their place in the world. Alden’s characters, a little bit older, have found comfort in subculture but are not necessarily great at navigating the world they’ve chosen for themselves, which might be harmful to them. Contained in the contrast between the two is a Generation X-er’s ability to enter into the world of professionalism, albeit with trepidation, as Tomine himself approximates the literary short story, and gets gigs doing illustration for The New Yorker, while Alden documents the sort of extended adolescence millennials fell into in the absence of other options.

Sam Alden is by no means unemployable: He worked on Adventure Time at the time he made New Construction, and his earlier comic Haunter is the sort of post-Fort-Thunder genre comic that might earn someone such a gig. The two stories in New Construction, on the other hand, are literary fiction: One, Backyard, follows a group of young people living together in a house in New Orleans, where one person has stopped speaking altogether, and now communicates only in barks, and has moved to the backyard. Everyone is accepting this in the manner of open-minded young people, doing the best they can, noting she seems a lot happier now. The other story follows two siblings, also living in New Orleans, who have gone through a traumatic with their parent in the past and are ill-equipped for the larger world, and are having an incestuous relationship. They are much looser in their visual approach than you see in a Tomine comic, with scanning and printing technology developing enough in the intervening decades that Alden can work directly in pencil. He really nails the texture of water at night. The elliptical quality to his comics seems oriented towards the visual, towards capturing a gesture or atmosphere, something that might be elusive if attempting to recall it later, making for comics that feel decidedly immediate. Alden self-released a book called Sledgehammer digitally at the end of 2022, and my distaste for paying for digital comics has prevented me from reading it. I should get over this. It’s probably pretty good.

We all need to find a way to negotiate the digital space. It’s funny that Uncivilized proprietor Tom K, as he is known in shorthand, shares a surname with the Unabomber. It’s less funny that the company’s website does not offer anything in the way of interior art previews to show what these comics look like, which is almost certainly a big part of why I didn’t read them until they were deeply discounted. Images are from Uncivilized Books included in this post partly to remedy this problem, although they of course have far more comics that I have not read and have no idea what their art looks like. The images from mid-nineties comics I highlighted are included as part of my general largesse.

#joann sfar #sam alden #jesse mcmanus #jess johnson #paul pope

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arecomicsevengood · 11 months

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I WANT TO GO TO THE RIVER // Molly Mendoza

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arecomicsevengood · 11 months

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A fun John Romita panel from My Love

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arecomicsevengood · 11 months

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arecomicsevengood · 11 months

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Molly Colleen O’Connell released two new comics recently, her first in several years. Both display an increased accessibility, while retaining her signature wiggliness: a high level of doodler’s digressiveness, moving about a room and saying “oh! what’s this?” to any stray bit of string. You might think, looking at the front cover of The Shriekers, that the focus of the book would be the figures framed by the window, the little Halloween-costumed children in the front yard. But no, the main characters of the book are the figures skulking about behind the curtains, hiding from both the outside world and the prospective reader’s immediate attention. On the back cover, we see their portraits on the wall, with names, amidst the props and furniture that features in the stories inside.

The Shriekers is a set of gag strips, following weird ghouls in a house, sort of like The Addams Family, while also reminiscent of Lizz Hickey’s Jammers comics. Interactions between the characters are limited, we’re introduced to them one at a time, and the structure, a la Richard Linklater’s Slacker, moves on to the next after a brief meeting. At this point, the humor isn’t character-based; rather the characters exist to explore the formal system being created by O’Connell’s drawings. It strikes me as the sort of thing that could continue parceled out into anthology contributions which could then be collected to form an issue two.

While The Shriekers moves about the space of its boarding house setting, Pebbles moves throughout time, flitting around the memories of its titular character, Pebbles. She’s seen at different ages, in different settings, (therapy, childhood, teen years, floppy-titted middle age) and is distinguished by her nose: In the end we see her in a sci-fi pod, and it’s explained she’s traveling through her consciousness, and while this makes sense of some of what we’ve seen, it doesn’t quite account for the digressions into anthropomorphic animals we’ve seen: a chicken atop a next of snake eggs, hatching her doom; two ostriches, with heads in the sand, coming up with ideas for t-shirts while bombs fall in the distance.

I want to see more of both of these stories. O’Connell’s approach is continually suggestive of the idea that she is going somewhere with her ideas, but also might take her time getting there, and maybe in the end your brain is going to need to fill in the blanks, extrapolating from what you’ve been given. Perhaps she is talking around something bigger than her current narrative can handle straight-on, and these themes might end up being addressed in another comic entirely, leaving a reader to grasp the extent of her interests by considering her oeuvre as a whole. Already I can see that Pebbles is talking about death, motherhood, and nature, time and memory, the future and the past: Some of these topics are addressed in the diary/memoir comics mourning O’Connell’s mother that have appeared on her instagram, which when collected will be more immediately understood in terms of power and emotion than the roving jokester consciousness at work in Pebbles.

Anyone looking at these comics has ample evidence of how interesting O’Connell is as a drawer. Pebbles features more grey wash, adding this painterly texture to a clean line that obeys its own wobbly logic to detail what the world is. The loose perspective, and eye for accumulated detail, makes moments like the conclusion of The Shriekers, where we zoom out to see an increasingly cluttered room, feel the same way as the close-ups would work in Ren And Stimpy, this grossness that vibrates with comedic effect.

Overall, the vibe is very animated, of an avant-garde-ish tint: Sally Cruikshank and Suzan Pitt being the American exemplars of an energy otherwise associated with Eastern Europe. While not able to feature the same fluidity of transformation that makes those pieces such mind-blowers of technical acumen, the principles of expansiveness are applied to how a page can move in traditional comic-book storytelling ways but still be so alive it seems to continually redraw itself. Thrilling comics for fans of the medium, currently available at both O’Connell’s BigCartel site and the Domino Books store.

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