Comic Quickies: Indie Gems

Comics Class: This one was one of my many exciting pick ups from Lucky's Comics in Vancouver.  Exciting enough that I read it at the first opportunity I got: on the bus ride home, with my lady reading over my shoulder.

We both loved it.

Maybe I'm a little predisposed to like Comics Class due to the fact that I work with school aged kids. This fact certainly helped me relate to the material, but there's plenty to like about Comics Class for every reader.  First of all, it is hilarious.  There's a lot of jokes packed into this 44 page comic, enough to get both me and my partner laughing out loud on multiple occasions.

In this "kind of based on a real class" comic, Matt Forsythe, the writer/artist/protagonist takes a job teaching a comic class at a local middle school.  A job which he rides a school bus to, arm wrestles students to prove a completely non-comics related point, and doesn't have his students do any actual comics creating for the first seven weeks.

In an ironic twist of fate, the Matthew Forsythe character in the comic has absolutely no success in teaching his students anything about making comics, However, I felt like I gained insight into making them just from reading the book.

The most impressive thing about Comics Class is that it manages to do so much in such a small amount of space. It is smart, witty, insightful, and a lot of fun to read.  This was the first comic I read in 2013 and I gotta say, I got off to a perfect start.

Wimbledon Green: I've been researching and branching out into more indie comics lately, and always two names pop up as must-read creators: Seth, and Chris Ware.  I've read Seth's It's a Good Life If You Don't Weaken and while I enjoyed it, I wasn't blown away.  However, the guy is extremely well respected in the comics medium, so I wasn't about to write the guy off after one pretty good, but not amazing reading experience.

This time around I went for Wimbledon Green, a comic that apparently originated as a comic he did in his sketchbook just for fun, and turned out to be a project he wanted to explore further.  The story follows the titular character, Wimbledon Green, who's an eccentric and avid collector of obscure, expensive comics. The guy is a bit of a mystery, as no one seems to know where he's from, how he got all his money to spend on comics, or even if he's who he says he is.

Regardless, Wimbledon Green has one of the most impressive rare and expensive comic collections around, a collection he's gathered thanks to some shady deals, trickery, manipulation, and possibly even outright theft.  The other comic collectors who act as Green's colleagues and rivals aren't much different in their comic collecting practices from Green.  All together they create a comic that was a lot of fun to read.

Seth's art in Wimbledon Green isn't as polished or as detailed as his other works that I've either read or thumbed through, and the lettering can be a bit hard to read at times.  That being said, I still enjoyed Seth's cartooning, and there's a fair amount of sight gags, jokes and just great cartooning in this comic to satisfy my tastes.

 Quimby the Mouse: As I mentioned earlier, aside from Seth, Chris Ware is the name that gets bandied about when folks talk about a modern master of the comics medium.  Despite his preeminence in the medium, his works have eluded me up to this point thanks to either scarcity or the price of the product.

During my most recent trip to the Fantagraphics Bookstore and Gallery I was determined to leave with a Chris Ware book in hand so that I could finally explore his work.  After pawing through his books and inquiring with the shop person, I decided the best place to begin was (surprise, surprise) the beginning.

Quimby the Mouse collects Ware's early works, mostly strips and one to two page comics. Some of which he made while still an undergrad in college.  The comic is printed in a very large format, and has a running gag that the material between the covers is from a discontinued library book.  Using the oversized format to its fullest capabilities, Ware fills up each and every page with either comics or text, and often his panels are postage stamp size or smaller.  This led to two things: I often found myself squinting to either read the microscopic text or view the art, and I found that on many occasions, it would take me 20-30 minutes just to work my way through a single page.  I didn't mind that the pages called for deep immersion, but I wasn't expecting so much squinting given the massive size of this comic.

In the end, all the squinting and eye strain paid off as I was rewarded with a great glimpse at what Ware is able to bring to the table in terms of comics.  His style of cartooning is completely unique, and pops off the page as very eye-catching.  I was also impressed with his ability to create a feeling of motion with his panel art.  In many of the Quimby strips I was able to quickly move my eye from one panel to the next and create the sensation that the art was actually moving, like a flip book or early animation.  All told, it was a cool experience, and I'm excited to explore more of his work in the future.

Graphic Novel Review: It's a Good Life If You Don't Weaken

About a year ago, at the Emerald City Comicon, Scott Kowalchuk told me I should check out some of the comics works by a writer/artist that goes solely by the name of Seth.  Kowalchuk is an incredibly solid dude, and I figured his comic recommendations would follow the solid trend, so I filed the name away in the back of my head, and kept my eye out for Seth's stuff anytime I was browsing the shelves in various shops around town.  It took a while to track something by Seth down, but I eventually wound up with a couple of his titles, and decided to read It's a Good Life If You Don't Weaken first.

In this semi-autobiographical comic, Seth tells the story of himself and his obsession with tracking down comics by an obscure cartoonist from the 1940's by the name of Kalo.  Seth's compulsive search takes him on a journey of both distance and time and while on his search to find obscure comics, finds a bit of himself as well.

One of the things that most impressed me about this graphic novel was Seth's ability to tell an engaging story in a way that seems simplistic, yet upon further scrutiny, proves to be quite detailed.  Seth's art style is definitely on the cartoon side of things, but his buildings and locations all have a great power to evoke a strong sense of time a place.  His small towns, railway stations, living rooms, bookshops and cafe's all have an air of familiarity and warmth to them, which helped me feel right at home in the narrative.  This comfort opens up the door for the reader to pay more careful attention to the juxtaposition of Seth's personal development and his search for Kalo's comics.

Another impressive aspect about Seth's art is the amount of emotion he is able to portray in his panels.  To put it simply: his stuff is moody.  He achieves this through a combination of what the character is doing in a given panel, and what the character's surrounding environment is.  It seems like a simple feat to derive emotion in this way, but it's not something I've seen done very often or done as well.

Seth sort of lures the reader in with a slow burning start to the story, and maintains a relaxed pace throughout.  To be honest, the writing here didn't impress me nearly as much as the art.  I didn't relate so well to Seth's character, and didn't care too much about whether or not he found more Kalo comics either.  I more or less just cruised along reading the story, but was never very engaged by it. Still, the cruise was a comfortable one, and relatively pleasing as well.

It's a Good Life If You Don't Weaken is more about the journey than the destination, and it's an artful journey for the reader.  The illustrations here will most likely provide the lion's share of entertainment value as the story itself is not as strong.  Still, this graphic novel is a fine example of how comics, and the art side of the medium can really tell an evocative story.  Trust me, or trust Scott Kowalchuk, Seth's work is worth a look.  Definitely something different from the mainstream norm.

Grade: B