Cartoonist As Insurgent: Charles Forsman's Revenger ... Is Trapped (1-shot)

Cartoonist: Charles Forsman
Publisher: Oily  

Charles Forsman's Revenger … Is Trapped courts illicitness. Think less criminal and more like an eleven-year-old boy finding a Cheri or Club International, waterlogged and with the covers torn off, in an empty lot or on the side of the road. Looking isn't optional. You want to look. You have to look.

Revenger … Is Trapped is the latest in Forsman’s on-going ultra-ultra-violent action comic about, as Forsman puts it on his Patreon homepage, ''a woman in an alternative 1980s USA that roams the land helping the beaten-down and exploited even the score against their oppressors. Think of it like the Incredible Hulk TV show from the 70s with a lot more blood.'' Any Bixby-esque do-gooder-ism on display in the previous issues is out the window with this 1-shot. Revenger … Is Trapped? More like: Revenger REVENGE thyself!

The story beats will feel familiar for those unfortunate souls nursed on 80s actioners from George Cosmatos and John Carpenter—slick yet raggedy American movies with a piquant finish of European sensitivity. Revenger requires no hand-holding, no whys or what-have-yous. Everything the reader needs to know is in the title. Simple. Shrewd. Forsman balls the jack and goes. Revenger … Is Trapped relies on the muscle memory of action movies and other sources of empty calories like side-scrolling video games, Dungeons & Dragons and (yes) comics—old school Comico titles like Mage, Elementals or Evangeline—verboten stuff. Forsman cops subversion, foments, he is the cartoonist as insurgent. Like Carpenter, Forsman gives readers what they want then EL SMACKO! the sobering morality of the moment sets in. Any play at pastiche is by design, a distraction, because when Forsman's subversion hits it hits … hard.

With apologies to Benjamin Marra, Revenger is a O.W.W.O.T. (One Woman War On Tormenters) and she represents Forsman's foremost subversion. She's not one of those classically beautiful scorned women, no Uma nor Glenn, no Thelma nor Louise. Black, scarred and with the back-half of the left-side of her head burned (?) so it looks like she lost a fight with a white hot harrow. Revenger sports a sleeveless top, gloves, ash grey jeans and boots, a no quarter-giving and no shit-taking badass. She looks like a weight lifter, muscular and meaty with thighs thick as tree trunks and arms like an old-timey bare-knuckle middleweight. Forsman draws Revenger as no bullshit. She looks the way a woman with a particular talent for face-punching and roundhouse kicks would and should look. Revenger is the ideal, not some idealized female form only a dude with an over-developed sense and yet (somehow) little understanding of human anatomical limits, an ink pot and an arrested intellect would call 'strong' and 'sexy' and somehow keep a straight face. Forsman may remember the thrill eleven-year-old boys get from discarded soft core porn mags, but Forsman ain't no eleven-year-old boy, he's a grown-ass man.

Forsman's what-you-see-is-what-you-get cartooning extends to his writing. After an ambush, Revenger gets put in a trunk, à la Oldboy, and thrown in an underground pit which branches off into a warren chockfull of wonders like a feral child, hillbillies, a bat-wielding blob and a tumoral seer, well, at least half of one. These circus freak-types are ugly and pitiful, but they are also obstacles in Revenger's way, so she beats them, brains them and rips off their limbs. The lack of punches pulled or limbs left in sockets thrills and disgusts in equal measure—comic book violence without the comic book.

Once Revenger does get topside her hero's journey is only half complete, she's still gotta' deal with a posse of punks with a penchant for pyramidal skull stacking and eyeball-frying. Thankfully this ugly bunch keeps a shed filled with firearms and a 'sharp' looking jacket best described as snikt-y. Forsman's cartooning in Revenger … Is Trapped has a rude, uncomplicated and unflattering edginess to it, if for no other reason than a story calling for harelips, goiters and bulging veiny arms should lack a sense of … romance. So when Forsman goes for the splashy shot of his buckled, booted and bladed heroine it becomes that much grander due to the starkness (ugliness) that precedes it, a perfect example of a cartoonist who understands comic books as a visual medium. And because this is a hyper-realized, over-the-top comic, Forsman punctuates this image of Revenger in full with words from and off panel assailant: ''There she is!'' Oh, yes. Oh, yes, indeed.

Forsman's escape from hillbilly prison plot is trite as are the bulgy-headed, trucker-cap wearing backwoods baddies who stand in Revenger's way. That's the point. Dumb clichés don't (have to) make action movies or comics dumb. Yes, Forsman succeeds in making a 'dumb' action story. And yeah, the local yokels aren't much more than stereotypical inbred straw men. How Forsman elevates Revenger from this morass of the dumbness is to show (not tell) how far a survivor, a killer, like Revenger will go to keep living and keep killing. The final page makes it clear what kind of code and set of morals define Revenger. There's no ambiguity in Revenger. She is Revenger, duh. There's also no doubt Forsman makes kick-ass action comics. What makes the difference is how Forsman gets in the reader's head and asks: what this kind of bloody good fun and chaotic morality says about the ugliness of the bloodthirsty mob that stares back.

For all things Revenger and Charles Forsman, visit revengerkills.com

'til the Blood Runs Red: Katie Skelly's My Pretty Vampire

(originally published at Loser City)

Katie Skelly hits all the 'feels.' Her comics bristle with verve, emotion and an 'it' factor best expressed as je ne sais quoi. What's easier, by far, to say (and see) is how she has honed her craft. Skelly is a cartoonist on the rise as her peers have confirmed. With Nurse Nurse, her 2012 debut, Skelly was able to get by on the charm of her idiosyncratic style and the risqué silliness of a story about nurses in space. In Operation Margarine (2014) she takes the sleazy low-brow trope of biker babes and elevates it to a modern morality tale of friendship, self-sacrifice, female empowerment and redemption. In between these two major works, Skelly has serialized a sex-positive-Barbarella-homage on-line porn comic, Agent 8, on slutist.

If Nurse Nurse and Operation Margarine are the major planets and Agent 8 is some kind of kinky satellite of love in the ever expanding Skelly-verse than the digital only Tonya—a skating fantasy comic about, yep, Tonya Harding—would be a whole other solar system, a recent discovery of the gravity and vastness of Skelly's talent. As if the pathos of Harding's real life story of wasn't enough, Skelly, with an equable and non-judgmental resolve, anatomizes Harding's highly toxic relationships, vulnerability and frustration as a woman amongst other competitive women and the damage therein. And all in twelve pages. The deeper tragedy Skelly wrings out of Harding's story comes from an exploration of how it must feel to be a top competitor and yet (almost) always finish out of the money, not a loser, but something far worse and far more human. Skelly shows how a metaphorical loser is perhaps better off than her real life equal. That's art. And it takes some ballsy ninja-storytelling skills to pull off such a feat. The implications on the final page of Tonya and the revelation that occurs in its final panel devastates in a way that's exclusive to comics, a last single frozen frame that sez it's all fucked (dearest) and you're (partly) to blame.

As Tonya was turning triple axels in Skelly's mind, she was also developing My Pretty Vampire on her tumblr and as a black-and-white mini-comic. In September, Skelly posted, ''after some big projects came and went and my style started changing, i [sic] decided to scrap what i had drawn to rewrite it and redraw it as a color comic.'' My Pretty Vampire took its bow in an 8½ X 11 European album format comic at the 2015 Small Press Expo. Later Skelly tweeted a vow to complete the next chapter by early November in time for Comic Arts Brooklyn.     

My Pretty Vampire begins and ends with a dream. One is unconscious and inert, while the other manifests as a conscious desire, an action. First dreams first. When Clover—the ''pretty'' vampire in question, a blond who sports a Bardot half undone updo—sleeps, she dreams of her past, of the frail girl in a diaphones robe as white as a winding sheet, of the girl she once was four years ago and the fanged bloodsucker she has become. Bare-chested and wearing red French cut briefs she looms over her supine self. Vampire-Clover is a sly coquette, curious, but un-tried. Corpse-Clover is dead and that's it. Dead. The larger panels to give Skelly's figures more brio and attitude, if such a thing is possible in her comics.

This image of the two Clovers foregrounds the dream's dominant colors, an oxygen-rich blood red and a pale canary yellow. Interlaced with black slashes, the image elicits a mood straight out of the wacked out cyclorama of Dario Argento's Suspiria. If you listen closely you can almost hear the nonsensical chanting of Goblin. Blood is colored black as it drips off flowers and from vampire-Clover's hair and as it pools around corpse-Clover's head. To turn the blood black is a smart choice from a shrewd storyteller because it foreshadows the narrative and speaks to Clover's standing as a character in stasis. The woman she was is dead and so is the blood. Clover is a vampire, yes, and powerful, yes, but she still feeds on the dead and not the living. Vampires are border crossers and Clover, for now, is stuck between stations. Right or wrong, Skelly's protagonists like Bon-Bon in Operation Margarine, Agent 9 and Tonya are all women of action and Clover is not, yet.

My Pretty Vampire is the first chapter in a longer story and even though it's a far too few fourteen pages, it's lithe and complete. Clover is a kept vampire, castled away by her brother Marcel who forces her to drink (black) ox blood instead of hunting on her own. Clover is impetuous, bratty and frustrated like many all Skelly's characters, ready to kick out the jams, but not sure how. Curious that Skelly is able to tap into this dissatisfaction when her art is so accomplished and never, never loses its shit cool.

Clover's room holds the trappings of her former life like stuffed toys and mirrors. In a flight of absurdism that dovetails with Skelly's love for cult classics and trash cinema, Clover wears a schoolgirl uniform, complete with pleated skirt, when she studies. The outfit and the requirement a vampire keeps up with her schoolwork is probably Marcel's doing … of course. It's on her way to her studies that she receives some contraband cigarettes and matches from the resident cook, Elsa. After all, who else? In a deft Argento-esque touch Skelly gives Elsa a semi-Romanian/Eastern accent that turns her 'v's' to 'f's' and 'w's' to 'v's.' Smokes in hand, the stage is set for the second of Clover's dreams, but in this one she's not the nocturnal wan wanderer looking for answers, she's a vampire with a pen, paper and a plan. Her fangs flank a cigarette as it burns between her lips as she writes: ''my escape.'' While not a full-on act of rebellion it's the proverbial penultimate moment before the wolves show up at the door, the stillness before the sharpest teeth sink through the softest flesh and all that blood starts to flow red, red, red.    

One of the reasons Skelly lists for redrawing My Pretty Vampire and publishing it is because, as she says, ''my style started changing.'' The style she refers to has, perhaps, more to do with her writing than her cartooning. Skelly sets herself apart as a cartoonist with her emotionally rich yet straight-forward linework and uncomplicated panels. Her style is her style and any 'change' is more in its refinement as she continues to perfect her craft. To see this 'change,' look at the entirely silent sequence of Clover swimming naked in the castle's indoor pool. The statues lining the pool's perimeter and the plumes of steam make Clover look like the undead goddess she's about to become. The colors and cartooning are some of the best work Skelly has done. The change, style-wise, comes in the inclusion of this sequence and how it informs the pacing of the story. It's languorous and makes the reader implicit in Clover's torpor and allows Skelly wink at (and indulge in) the Fonda-esque. The panel she reserves for a wafting curl of steam as it rises to meet the moon transcends as it adds mood on top of mood to an already moody and sexy sequence.

Slowing down the narrative to include a story beat like this steam bath is something Skelly began in earnest in Operation Margarine. She further develops this technique in Tonya where she uses a single panel of a tweeting bird to smash cut to the abuse Tonya has suffered, a metaphoric fracture as to the character's state of mind. The cutaway to the steam in My Pretty Vampire is more tangential, more about atmosphere, but the effect is similar in how it plays with time, develops the story and comments on the action. Skelly's character game has always been a strong. The only change in her work is in how much more muscular she has become as a storyteller.

My Pretty Vampire and Tonya are evidence of Skelly's ability to pull off deeper and deeper dives into emotional depths with the saucy self-confidence of an 'it girl.' Perhaps that's what Skelly is, an 'it girl' of indie comics—a sophisticated and expert cartoonist ready to strike.
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For all things Katie Skelly visit her Tumblr. 

Keith Silva believes the best way to watch Deathdream is with the sound turned down and Iggy Pop's Lust for Life turned all the way up! Follow @keithpmsilva

 

Review: The Mire

Live After Death

 

The Mire holds mysteries; skeletons so shrouded and secrets so subtle that when artist, author and auteur Becky Cloonan at last pulls back the pall, she reveals human frailty, its folly and how love endures even after death. The Mire would make Edgar Allan Poe shake with envy and weep with joy.

 

Where Wolves, Cloonan's previous mini-comic, relies on an austere economy of language, she dresses The Mire in a finery of words and letters, vows and curses. There is always someone (or something) with a question to ask, an order to give or a tale to tell. What gets said (and read) allows one more tumbler to fall into place and brings another terrible truth to light. Cloonan's canniness appears in the title; The Mire hangs heavy with consequences and relies on allusion, elusion and illusion to tell a unique tale.      

Cloonan locates The Mire around a simple plot: a knight, Sir Owain, on the eve of battle, tasks his squire, Aiden, to brave the ''withering swamp'' and deliver a letter, post-haste, to Castle Ironwood. A portion of the Poe-ness present in The Mire comes from how Cloonan builds suspense through texts. Like Poe's unnamed narrators who write or receive letters, the act of correspondence animates this story and gives Cloonan the freedom to play with text and image on myriad levels.  

Once Aiden sets out there is a (near) imperceptible change in how the narrative is told. This kind of delicate touch demonstrates Cloonan's command as a storyteller and comic book artist. Either by coincidence, convenience or in deference to her muses -- Cloonan's artfulness pulls off the trifecta -- a particular species of bird appears to act as an avian usher when Aiden enters the swamp. This same bird remains a presence in the story, a feathered Virgil on vigil.

 

Ink defines Becky Cloonan as an artist. The first panel proper (an opening page shows Sir Owain in reverie before his worktable) is of fingers, pen, paper and ink pot -- Cloonan must have smiled when she came up with that idea. Hair and bare branches, armor and eye sockets, cloaks and bed curtains, all appear rich, deep and dark, ink is Cloonan's true signature; a landscape of silhouettes and soulful lines.

 

Cloonan drapes The Mire in curtains. Characters act as showmen pulling back blinds and parting canvas walls to reveal an in-between world, half-open and half-obscured -- a setting, again, where Roderick Usher or Ligeia would feel at home. Cloonan's men, women and children all brood beneath a foreground of tousled brows suffuse with secrets. The atmosphere may be furtive, the motifs enigmatic, but at its nucleus, The Mire is a romance and at her heart, Cloonan is a literary and classic romantic.

       

The reader who troubles The Mire wades into moralities murky and consequences clear, a tale both sad and wise and a work of passion, craft and smarts. Becky Cloonan knows how to wound with words and kill with pictures -- a singular talent of pen and prose.

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The Mire, Wolves and something called a Manticore Tote of Holding are all available at http://beckycloonan.bigcartel.com/

Review: Blast Furnace -- Recreational Thief! Vol. 1

'stache Stash

Ryan Browne's Blast Furnace Recreational Thief Volume One exists for every comic book fan that says, 'fuck, why don't more heroes wear flaming neckties.' An esprit de Blast Furnace (if such a thing was a thing) would require a light touch, improvisational pluck and twirling twirling always twirling  

 

Acute assonance comes no better than in the titular Earnest Furnace. What about 'Blast' you ask, where does that come in? Look, opportunities to make alliterative vowel jokes come rarely or not at all, smoke 'em if you got 'em, amirigt? Dude only signs his name 'Blast Furnace' (actually he only signs 'Blast Fu' which is a joke too, get it? FU -- Ed.) and besides, Browne should be given a friggin' Rhysling for coming up with a name like Earnest Furnace in the first place. A murderous S.O.B, Furnace shoots first, enjoys a good crab boil (who doesn't) and drives a Prius -- it's a rental, but still, effort.  

Blast Furnace is like a kick to the crotch (that seems harsh), O.K., how about 'a dark chest of wonders' (better, much better) to remind readers that ideas rule and plans are for pussies. In his 'act as if' approach, Browne creates a comic as an extemporaneous exercise in storytelling. Browne says it this way and with far less pretension: ''[Blast Furnace] was created a page a day with an hour spent on each page (or thereabouts) with little to no pre-planning over the course of six months.''

What keeps Blast Furnace from slapdash half-assery comes from a fire hydrant gush of brainstorms, gags and non-sequiturs. Its un-predictableness is what keeps it fresh. Browne goes whole-ass in this comic; the jokes aim low, hit hard and come in on all sides, some silly some stupid and others straight-up surreal. Chances are that Browne writes the first (and only) bird-shit-in-the-mouth gag that makes one consider Chaos Theory, no joke.

Like a Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker movie -- more Kentucky Fried Movie and Airplane! than Naked Gun or Hot Shots! -- Browne strings sketches that feel loose and impulsive, but never out of place.  So when ''He who looks exactly like a horse but actually is just a hideously deformed man'' or Ralphie the Bear or even the dragon bartender appears on the page it comes off feeling original and less asinine than it sounds. Browne's puns-per-page rival the output of Brandon Graham.

Wait. Who the hell is He who looks exactly like a horse but actually is just a hideously deformed man?  What about Blast Furnace or Earnest Furnace or whatever the fuck his name is, what about that dude? See, that's the thing about a thing like Blast Furnace, it loses something in the translation when you give all the jokes away and it never stagnates long enough on one mustachioed thief or anthropomorphic extra before it's on to the next one. Perhaps the most genius turn Browne takes imagines instructional art school doodles 'Tippy the Turtle' and 'the Pirate' as paid contract killers. No shit. What could be a throwaway at its folksiest gives the story insider immediacy, inspiration and the saddest backstory ever to feature a blue snaggletooth toy, a boy vampire and an afro pick.

Only someone who would kick a puppy would call Browne's cartooning crude. O.K., there is no innovative panel layout here or detailed backgrounds that looks like someone went on a weeklong meth-bender, but as an added bonus, no photo-reference either, score. For those in the 'my-kid-could-do-that-or-I-could-do-that' crowd, welcome to the not-so-profitable, but wonderful world of DIY comics and you're wrong. Browne knows sequential art, knows where to place word bubbles to cover up the naughty bits and he knows a crack about a robot businessman built out of other robot businessmen kills every time.

 

If it weren't for all the fucking swear words and needless, pointless preventable violence (always the best kind) one could claim Blast Furnace Recreational Thief Volume One Wonka-esque.  To go further, one could employ (leaning on a too long overused cliché) the phrase, 'Browne takes readers down the rabbit hole;' however, this creates a false sense of all-ages appropriateness and no comic with this amount of inter- and intra-species hard sex not to mention ''incredibly hard, graphic and exhausting love making sessions'' should be given to children or someone who can't legally be admitted to R-rated movies.

Blast Furnace winks at the 'mad ones, mad to live, mad to talk' (to coin a phrase), those for whom one super-powered Fu Manchu mustache can never be enough. It comes from place where a cyclopean-news reporter makes as much sense as enslaved chain-smoking and trucker-hat-wearing ostriches who only want a 'little personal time' to enjoy some pay-per-view. If that sounds ridiculous and manic you haven't heard the half of it. Blast Furnace (ahem) fires the mind and makes you think how fun it is to steal in a found art anything goes hip-hop kooky-kind-of-way.

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Blast Furnace Recreational Thief Volume One was a Kickstarter success. For non-backers Browne is as entrepreneurial as he is funny so there is an Etsy site:

 

http://www.etsy.com/listing/115126147/blast-furnace-recreational-thief-volume

 
Or you can visit the virtual Ryan Browne at http://godhatesastronauts.tumblr.com/

Review: Black Church

Children of the Damned

My review of Andy Belanger's Black Church is up at Comics Bulletin. I like the way this review turned out and I hope that my writing corrupts you enough, constant reader, to put some cash in Belanger's pocket. I believe that supporting self-published, creator-owned (natch) work like Black Church is the ultimate act in 'voting with your wallet.' As I continue to develop this ethos (Dude, at least it's an ethos) about creator-owned work, I'm beginning to wonder about how buying self-published work direct from the creator(s) and backing Kickstarter projects squares down at the ol' LCS. Another post for another time.  

I started out a Metalhead. As I was writing about Black Church and revisiting (reliving) the things I love about Metal, I remembered a time that, in a fit of pique, I burned a bunch of Thor comic books in a sand quarry behind my parent's house. Why I decided to burn those comics -- I remember a few of them being Simonson's Surtur Saga, so is that irony or coincidence? -- instead of throwing them in the trash (nobody recycled back then) remains a journey into mystery, but that's what I did. Maybe even then I didn't like mainstream publishers. I kid, I kid. It was around 1986 and I was beginning to develop my own taste in music. I was listening to the radio and, of course, watching as much MTV as I could. I'll spare you all the details about why I torched The Mighty Thor, other than to say, that as a young Roman Catholic and an altar boy, I thought a lot about Satan … a lot.     

Satan was easy to find in the 1980's. The big 'D' Devil was practically a franchise; and Satan was quite the polymath when it came to pop culture. TV shows, books, games and movies were all Satan's thrall, but where the 'Morning Star' burned brightest was in recording studios and record stores. The PMRC was coming into its ascendency and Blackie Lawless was about to become a household name.

What got me to strike a match and burn the 'God of Thunder' (besides ignorance and stupidity) was a two-night presentation (our parents had to sign permission slips to allow us to attend) at my middle school about the pervasiveness of Satan in popular culture. The guy who came to talk to us wasn't some fire and brimstone preacher. He was dynamic, I'm sure, but this was (for all intents and purposes) a school function and not a tent revival; and we were Catholics, after all, and you can't have Catholicism without Old Scratch.

Looking back on it now, it was little more than a power point lecture except back in the day we called those slide shows. Basically, what happened was I got my first taste of mass hysteria and (yes) mob rule. I'm glad this guy didn't hand out Dixie cups of Kool-aid and ask us to join him in the Kingdom of Heaven because it would have been bottom's up. The school was a mess the next day, nobody could concentrate and all anyone wanted to talk about was Satan, Ouija boards and what they threw out when they got home last night.

I guess I felt I had to play my part in the salvage mission for my soul by fighting fire with fire (again Surtur) and make a burnt offering to God. How pagan is that? ANYWAY! Once the hysteria wore off I went straight for the loudest and most satanic music I could find, Iron Maiden. My musical tastes have expanded since then, although I still love mid-80's Maiden and always will. Cynicism (I suppose) has turned Satanism into a marketing strategy, even children of the damned gotta' eat. In this case, maybe ignorance is bliss, there's something exciting about thinking that reading a comic book or listening to a certain kind of music is a dangerous and subversive act and maybe it still is … maybe.  \m/
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7/6 7 PM EST  Belanger confirmed in a DM on Twitter: 'The title of the next chapter [of Black Church] is called the 'Mad Priest!' It's going to be dripping with evil sermons.'  Pray for us!

http://andybelanger.bigcartel.com/ is where you can lose your mortal soul and get your own copy of Black Church.

and here's the link to the review on Comic's Bulletin: http://www.comicsbulletin.com/main/reviews/minicomic-black-church