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Special Feature   SPX Spotlight 3 By Adam McGovern Published: 2008-10-31 Being a sporadic accounting of self-made masterworks I picked up at the premier indie-comics event, the Small Press Expo.

The ghost-like presence of celebrities and word leaders in our lives, pervasively influential but seldom seen and never met, and our own ephemeral feeling in their shadow, is a guiding theme of Geoff Grogan’s ongoing GN Nice Work. It follows the early-’60s misadventures of John del Gatto, a semi-fictional stand-in for Frank Sinatra, developed from one urban-legendish reference in a famous lengthy magazine profile in which everyone who knew Sinatra but Sinatra was spoken to. In Part One “Johnny Cat” takes as much advantage of his resemblance to his absent boss as possible, gambling on his tab, giving the odd counterfeit concert and diverting surplus groupies. In the first chapter of Part Two, available at SPX as a minicomic preview (while the series is updated at www.moderntales.com), Johnny’s on-the-road narrative filling in for Frank on a movie shoot in the desert beyond Vegas becomes a real-life on-the-run movie, as he tries to shield sometime-lover Jo, who’s also mixed up in the intrigues of the Kennedy administration (as one of JFK’s many mistresses and someone who knows too much about certain covert warfare).

Jo is pursued by intelligence agencies and Johnny winds up manipulated by the Mob. Both are defined by more powerful and remembered men, and both are vivid apocryphal underdog characters fighting to avoid being edited from history. Prototypical counterculture rebels in pillbox hats and fedoras, they resist social limits while seeking to be players in the same system that’s consuming them. It’s a tragic American tension between irrepressible independence and unsatisfiable appetites that’s embodied by the desolate frontier of the desert all around them. As Johnny searches for Jo, he links up with a burlesque comedian and his drag-queen partner, and the friction between Johnny and this other, much less accepted yet much more contented role-player makes for some of the series’ most comic dialogue and poignant points. Brash yet weighty, Nice Work is a ride through our celebrity culture and broken democracy’s Year One that’s well worth revisiting.

In Rafael Grampa’s first full-length book Mesmo Delivery, a remote truckstop is the stage for a gruesome drama of dead-end lives and hellishly low roads. Grampa is a Brazilian writer/artist with a keen insight into American roadside mythos (the artwork is a small museum of archaic snackbar advertising and gaspump artifacts), and one of the few comic artists anywhere who squares a genius for gritty detail with an instinct for dynamic and cohesive overall composition. He’s got a camera-eye that midcentury Marvel Comics would kill for, yet an eccentric personality that could make any current alternative cartoonist look over their shoulder and tremble as they try to sleep; the broad caricatures and clash-of-the-titans body-language hypnotize like your first childhood Disney feature while the squalor of Grampa’s white-line-noir scenario makes you feel you might get cut or catch something from the very pages. As always, distributor AdHouse Books brings coffeetable production values and impeccable design sense to the unpretentious and immediate content. If Spain Rodriguez rebooted Thimble Theatre or Sam Shepard tackled Tales From the Crypt it would come close to this strong solo debut, but still not be as good.

One book that wasn’t at SPX but should’ve been was the limited-edition minicomic version of Dom Regan’s forthcoming online High Pilot series (site in-progress here), a psychedelic super-splatterfest with weird hyper-dimensional deities locked in abstract archetypal struggles over, well, stuff that seems like it must be really important. The High Pilot ranges through a dayglow wasteland looking like a stray Blue Meanie from the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine elevated to legendary gun-for-hire in some endless celestial shooter. The lack of any outlines or blacks works well to convey strange spirits released from the confines of physical reality but holding their ectoplasmic cloudlike form at some level above the nebulae. (It also works slightly better in print than it does on the evenly-illuminated computer screen; Regan’s color choices convey an eerie glow and unreal vitality in any medium, but resolve a bit more in the physical spectrum of ink.) Regan twists the commonplaces of the artform to conjure his scenario’s otherworldliness – text is as much décor as meaning, with ornate typefaces caught like fireflies in grasping amorphous word-balloons or booming at mountain-inscription scale as characters threaten or castles blow their stacks. If as Nietzsche said gods exist by being believed in, then these guys are hallucinated to life, riding the Viking-ship slosh of those LSD-like chemicals scientists say are in all our brains. Regan is tracing the unconscious neon cave-markings of our posthistoric video vision-quest. Wipe out and log on!!