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Special Feature
Geek Fest 2 A sporadic series on the Best-in-Show books at the Northeast?s leading indie-comics communion, the MoCCA Arts Festival By Adam McGovern
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The masterfully mistaken cover logo of Frank Reynoso’s Saucy #1, off-register like a Warhol print and drawn from a slang 70 years out of date, clued me that this was going to be a daredevil leap across the chasm between vintage-comic innocence and this-minute sarcasm. The opening Hulk/all-purpose-steroid-moron satire, “The Phenomenal Jock,” didn’t quite deliver past the automatic snicker of its premise. But then Reynoso gets down to dystopian business with “Sock the Vote” and an untitled ad for the wonder-drug “O-balm-a,” two merrily nihilistic indictments of civic duty; and “By George,” a brilliant comic-of-the-absurd told in increasingly surreal nonsense-speak that will give a cathartic laugh to anyone whose life partially depends on paychecks from corporations. The eponymous hero survives a hellish job interview in which the baffling jargon turns into a kind of sorcerous gibberish, and Reynoso speaks in tongues just enough to let us in on the joke his tortured protagonist is missing. The artist’s command of rubber-limbed emotional calligraphy is inspired, and especially in this last story the catalogue of Monopoly-box caricatures that move through his high-stakes office landscape is a who’s-who of hilarious, good-natured stereotype. The doomed kewpie-dolls of the micro-comic Wish continue in a similar vein, and Reynoso’s art for the minicomic Buenas Noches (written by James Spruill) shows him comfortable with gritty, expressionist-woodcut noir as well. [www.frankreynoso.com]
A cheery take on the eternal night of dead-end jobs and go-nowhere towns is also supplied by the Marvel Digital debut of Ryan Dunlavey, a usual-suspect of indie comics from his art on the edutainment hit Action Philosophers. It took a fellow egghead at MoCCA Fest to tell me about Dunlavey’s MODOK story, so here it belongs. Supplying script, art, colors and lettering like an inversion of the old-school sweatshops he’s been helping chronicle in Comic Book Comics, Dunlavey launched the first chapter of this archfiend farce the week of this year’s MoCCA Fest. In it, the gene-modified floating-head madman begs for work from current master of the world Norman Osborn, and gets assigned to unspecified duties in Erie, Pennsylvania (his pre-mutation hometown). A grinding first page of panels composed entirely of MODOK’s increasingly desperate unanswered voicemails offering to accept even part-time domination and mass-murder mines cathartic comedy gold from the current job market, and MODOK’s household tyranny of his mom, dad and few remaining henchman, and his paranoid “reconnaissance” of class reunions among bullies and rivals he’s still scared of, promise to keep hilarity ensuing. Dunlavey’s way with frenzied facial ticks and twisted body language helps demonstrate the natural comic element for a petulant disembodied head you’re supposed to find terrifying, and Dunlavey’s dayglo ice-cream-cake color scheme makes it seem like everyone’s been imprisoned in an amusement park. After one chapter you’ll look forward to being trapped there with ’em.
Available at the ACT-I-VATE webcomics collective table, where I flipped through the future of comics in a proof of the upcoming anthology of the group’s visionaries from IDW, was member Mike Cavallaro’s Eisner-nominated Parade (With Fireworks), a breathtaking vignette of family history in Fascist Italy. Set mostly in the early 1920s, Parade adapts an episode from the life of the writer/artist’s forebears, evoking the ominous rumblings of 20th century totalitarianism while using Cavallaro’s warm and welcoming shorthand style to draw us into the intimacy of village life.
History keeps outpacing the main character Paolo, who gets disillusioned by the dislocations of WWI, the dog-eat-dog conflict of immigrant America, and the changes in a homeland he pines for as it disappears before his eyes. Caught up in a family feud magnified by the rift between socialism and fascism, Paolo faces bloody struggles and fugitive life, while the rural beauty of his ancestral town infuses the narrative and a kind of peace finally settles in even as the deadly events of the WW2 era rush forward around him.
Cavallaro has a keen ear for the poetry of ornate, folkloric early-century speech, and an expert way with laments for home and lost innocence that build up like an incantation, an unanswered prayer. His colors are luminous and lush, from the nocturnal forestry setting of Paolo’s time in hiding to the sepia-photograph sunlight that suffuses his memory. Cavallaro’s sensitivity with expressive cartoon essentials and vitality with action-comics’ energy and kinetics recalls, while not resembling, that of Dean Haspiel, who supplies an essay to the end of the collected edition.
The use of serial imagery, repeated subtly to map the seasons of life; symbolic objects (the sickle of communism, the scythe of harvest); and “psychological gels” of color for moments of emotional intensity, is sophisticated, as is the use of simple motifs – like prison bars – to mark off the partitions of people’s outcast states and unspoken separation. Parade (With Fireworks) is a graphic poem of humble hopes in the shadow of grand history. [www.66thousandmilesperhour.com; www.activatecomix.com]
Read Part 1 here
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