Comics: Plague Johnny #1

Plague farces a checked gut across the wed bigot. Throughout plague shouts Johnny. Plague distorts Johnny in the slave rat. When can plague walk over Johnny? A baby snacks.

Read More

Interview: Cameron Stewart on Sin Titulo

Cameron Stewart is a multiple award-winning illustrator who is perhaps best known for his work on various mainstream superhero titles, such as Catwoman (with Ed Brubaker), Seven Soldiers of Victory (with Grant Morrison) and Batman and Robin (also with Morrison).

Since 2007, however, he has been quitely working on his low-key, formalist and often poetic webcomic, Sin Titulo.  It's arguably here that we see Stewart's true talents, striking a unique style far removed from the sanitized world of superhero art and forging an intelligent, literate voice in its writing.

I spoke to Stewart this year at the Emerald City Comicon in Seattle to find out more about the craft and creative process behind the strip, which won the Eisner for Best Digital Comic in 2010.

Read More

Review: Anya's Ghost by Vera Brosgol

Anya's Ghost - Vera Bosgol (w/a)
First Second, $15.99, ISBN: 978-1-59643-552-0

Typically, young adult books are barely distinguishable from children's literature. They are instructive, moral, cautionary and inclusive — young people don’t want to feel estrangement, say the writers and editors, shoving comforting, distracting garbage down young throats like sour medicine — “this is what's good for you!” These “insiders” (as author and critic Thomas Ligotti would label them) abound in the teen realm, creating entertainments of rebellion and angst, only to have these sparks of self-aware individuality — outisderism — quashed in the final act. Think of any teen narrative and how its drama and resolution are concerned solely with the protagonist’s integration with society at large. Outsiders, on the other hand, can articulate the dread of finding one’s sense of self to be a fraudulent display and fiercely rage against falling into line with the orthodoxy of society.

How refreshing then to find that in Vera Brosgol’s Anya’s Ghost we find the markings of a true outsider spirit. In her teenage heroine, Brosgol creates a self-cipher —a Russian-American torn between the traditional, old-world values of her mother and the competitive popularity of the private high school she is forced to attend. The Orthodox of her family religion and the literal uniformity of the school are clear indicators of what the author is driving at here. Of course, Anya does not fit in to either world: she’s too modern for her mother’s ways (she’s into Glasgow indie music for crying out loud) and too foreign to fit in at school. Her only friend is the curiously androgynous Siobhan, and the two spend most of their time together skipping PE class and smoking.

Like many outsiders, Brosgol is drawn to the macabre, and how fitting that the eponymous spectre is a manifestation of the horrors of conformity. Upon falling, Alice-like, down a disused well, Anya meets Emily — the ghost of a young girl who had been thrown down there and left to die. Emily attaches herself to Anya and becomes the doting best friend she never had, who helps her cheat on tests and get closer to the cute boy on the basketball team. For a while, we’re tossed into a John Hughes world (complete with montage) of unlikely friends and the inevitable rise to popularity of the outcast. So used to the formula are we that it may be tempting to close the book half-way through, since the ending seems so certain. But, thankfully, Brosgol is too cynical to let that happen.

Once Emily has helped Anya to become a picture of conformity, rejecting her old friend and finally becoming accepted by her peers, we realize that all is not what it seems. Gradually the veneer is peeled back and Anya sees people for who they actually are — the insiders only pretend to be happy in order to maintain their place in society, and the further inside she gets, the more she wants out.

Anya’s move towards homogeny is revealed to be the source of Emily’s power — she feeds on Anya’s acceptance and approval — and the once-benevolent spirit grows ever more corporeal and malicious, forcing her to comply with a reductive, idealist picture of adolescence. When Anya refuses, the ghost soon starts endangering her family and we too share in the horror of obedience.

That Anya wins out in the end, and the fact we have a semblance of a happy ending may be seen as a victory for the insiders, but a closer look reveals a much darker hue to the book’s resolution. With Emily cast back into her well, Anya has the hole filled under the pretense of public safety — congratulated on this initiative by her school principal, she gives him her full, Russian name and clearly marks her territory outside of mainstream American society. The closure of the well itself is a significant gesture towards the abjection of conformist trappings.

With Emily disposed of, Anya is reunited with Siobhan, but it is a bittersweet reunion. She declines Siobhan’s offer of a cigarette because she doesn’t feel like smoking anymore. That’s a kicker. In casting-off this affectation, she’s also rejecting her friend, after all, not only are cigarettes simply a capitalist signifier of rebellion, but by also characterizing Siobhan with this oral fixation, Brosgol shows her as an insider in her own way; dependent and immature. In the end, Anya has rejected everyone — between alienation and conformity, she chooses to be an outsider.

It took Tolstoy the greater part of his career to realize his place as an outsider, that Brosgol achieves it so early is a startling achievement. The fact that she chooses to make comics for young adults gives them a genuine voice to relate to. While insiders will take joy in the cool, easy line of her art, the outsiders will bask in the reflective gaze of its abyss.

-- Gavin Lees

Read More

Review: Orc Stain vol. 1 by James Stokoe

Orc Stain vol. 1 - James Stokoe (w/a)
Image Comics, $17.99, ISBN: 978-1-60706-295-0

The thing about Orc Stain… It’s full of dicks — purple-and-green-headed monsters… cocks, dongs, peckers, peters, pans, rods, meat poles, tallywhackers, ding-a-lings, ding dongs, dorks,  dicktators, love pumps… heat seeking moisture missiles… one-eyed wonder worms… wangs, willies, wieners, units, noodles, knobs, schlongs, tube steaks, red rockets, meat puppets, John Thomases, johnsons, trouser snakes, Mr. Happies, Lincoln logs, Alabama black snakes… boners, choads, hard-ons, helmets, main veins, man muscles, meat popsicles, one-eyed monsters, skin flutes, pocket rockets, pricks, shafts, steamin’ semen roadways, third legs, tonsil ticklers… melted-marshmallow squirt guns… Power Swords (or the keys to Castle Grayskull)… wankers, weewees, Mr. Winkies, beaver cleavers, meat thermometers, sausages, bologna ponies, bone coasters…

Orc penises.

Now, comprehensive and rude as the above list à la George Carlin may be: compared to the number of orc gronches* savagely diced and mutilated within the first six issues of Orc Stain, it’s about as darling as a small child farting while blowing out the candles on her birthday cake. Severed gronches line the belts and necklaces of orc warriors, wrap around warlords’ necks like furs and hang from shamanic staves as if they were mystic wards.

To emasculate a fellow orc is a sign of violent potency and supremacy which, in a race that, at this current point in the story, is completely devoid of females, makes for a cultural identity that is entirely neurotic. But the gronch is at once sacred and powerful and a commodity, for if an orc who’s claimed another’s gronch wishes he can skin, slice, dip and fire a gronch to turn it into chits: the orcish currency. It can only follow, then, that the greater the number of severed gronches that exist in the orc world, the greater the amount of wealth.

These are not, however, the only dicks in Orc Stain. The Orc Tzar, leader of the Jungle Clan and Ganga-Gronch** obsessive, is a huge dick; Boss Beard and his deadly Shaktu shock troops are hairy and four-armed dicks respectively, and lastly, Pointy Face, who perhaps deserves all that comes to him, is a very nasty dick.

Were it not for one unequivocally important piece of the story structure, all this dickery might amount to nothing more than a very pretty comic drawn by a dude obsessed with orcs and penises. Thankfully, though, there is a balance between Orc Stain’s male and female actors, and it makes good sense that a culture that is basically one giant penis, a culture without flaws in the minds of its people, entirely healthy, be threatened by walking, talking STDs.

To date, the Swamp Rambas are still quite a mystery. We know they are adept apothecaries, Poison Throwers to the orcs, and that when an orc is infected with their poison they bloat and fester, growing intense sores and boils until they burst. And of course, most importantly, judging what we know now they are a race made up entirely of women. Up until the reader meets the first Ramba, Bowie Enocraz Yaramund, the women in the world of Orc Stain are used for sex only. These “love nymphs” are seen as second class objects made for fucking, and in no way do they hold any power over their orc lovers. Perhaps this is because they do not threaten the orc cocks. They promise comfort and escape from the constant dick-on-dick action of orc culture and smile all along.

The Rambas, though, not only find the orcs repulsive, but in the case that some unlucky warrior idiot wanders into their swamps, they waste no time turning them into piles of puss and slime. If to be an orc, a real orc, means keeping one’s manhood intact while depriving your peers of there own; to be a threat to an orc one must become a threat to their entire system of sexual dominance: a promise that in any one encounter, the most an orc can hope for is to walk away an abomination, their gronch too horrible to be worth a single chit.

-- Ian Burns

*Gronch is the orc work for genitalia. If that wasn’t already clear…

**Gronchiest of Gronches.

Read More

Review: I Will Bite You! by Joseph Lambert

I Will Bite You! - Joseph Lambert (w/a)
Secret Acres, $14, 9-780979-960956

Terry Gilliam knew a thing or two about recycling myths and fables to his own advantage when he produced those now-legendary animations as part of the Monty Python team.  Using stock figures from illuminated versions of The Canterbury Tales, Aesop’s Fables and assorted religious texts allowed him to subvert these icons and symbols in surreal and parodic ways.  It’s this work that is immediately called to mind when looking at the work of Joseph Lambert.

His debut collection of short comics, I Will Bite You!, assembles various works that span from the artist’s studies at CCS to the present day.  Although Gilliam appears to be a heavy influence here, Lambert’s aims are entirely different.  He uses the symbols of myth to produce work that has a timeless, resonant quality — even, in one of the collection’s highlights, going so far as to update one of Aesop’s classic tales.

The moralizing Greek is never far away in the other stories.  Personified suns and moons loom ominously over the characters in the strip “Everyday” and the title story.  In the latter tale, a Kirby-faced boy (with a tail, no less) does exactly what the title threatens — all the while watched over by two mischievous suns.  Like the gods of the past, they interfere directly with the angry child’s life, tormenting and provoking him further.  Unlike the fables, though, it is they who learn a lesson through suffering.  In this increasingly secular age, the story reflects the paradigm shift between believers and their gods.

That all this is done without any words (only a chaotic crayon scribble in a speech balloon to signify the child’s rage) underscores the universal quality of Lambert’s comics.  There is a beautiful formalism at work in these pages that functions thematically as well as expositionally.  In “I Will Bite You!” the suns always occupy the top tier of panels — a comfortable gutter between them and the humans (monsters? aliens?) below.  When our frustrated protagonist finally turns against his tormentors, it’s with a breaking of convention and the fourth wall of the comics page.  This is a recurring trademark of Lambert’s work — the marauding child-eaters (they’re sinister enough without resorting to the label “paedophage”) reassemble sound-effects and speech bubbles to cover their tracks in “After School Snacks” or the seemingly corporeal sounds of the music in “Mom Said” which we see billowed around in the evening breeze.

Lambert’s approach to comics is remarkably physical. Although he has a post-modern awareness that these stories are simply lines on paper, there is a clear investment in the surreal worlds he builds that makes them convincing, concrete and complete.  His experimental ideas are interesting enough to mark him as a stand-out among the recent glut of young cartoonists, and his linework self-assured enough to give an iconic trademark to his storytelling.  And some of it is truly stunning.  The strip “(Caveman)” presents some beautiful prehistoric visuals as two cavemen ape the myths of Icarus and Prometheus, and touch the face of a god.

That he has only just begun his career in comics (with many of the pieces collected here being reprints of Lambert’s self-published minicomics), there would appear to be great things ahead for Joseph Lambert.  What awaits with his sophomore work should be interesting to follow, as this debut has already set the bar rather high.

-- Gavin Lees

Read More