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Awesome 2: Awesomer
(The second of the Indie Spinner Rack anthologies)
Posted 30 Aug 2009
Editor: Charlito and Mr. Phil
Publisher: Top Shelf
4.00 out of 5 Stars
Reviewed by Adam McGovern
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Awesome 2: Awesomer is so much fun and such a bargain that
you’ll forget you’re helping the industry and realizing
someone’s educational dreams. For less than 15 bucks (with a
free minicomic!) you get over 200 pages and some 70 pioneering
creators, all convincing you how much you want the Indie Spinner Rack
podcast, whose hosts edited the tome, to continue covering and
advancing the artform, and how important it is for the part of that
$14.95 that doesn’t fund ISR to put a promising artist through
the Center for Cartoon Studies (whose students did the endearing and
imaginative minicomic).
The collection hits its stride (or strut) 20 pages in with another
shab-tacular installment of Jim Rugg & Brian Maruca’s
Afrodisiac, in which the separate ’70s worlds of
blaxploitation film, trend-hopping mainstream comics and
tragically-topical undergrounds come a little closer to colliding
than they did in real life.
John Bergin’s “Ticket to Ride” tours death as a
lofty, lonely highrise (a neat twist on the ascension imagery of
every age and culture, from Jacob’s Ladder and the Norse
“world tree” onward and backward). Bergin pitches the
sinister and sublime shades of the setting and its fading spirits perfectly, and his gauzy, smudged-charcoal style is a pinnacle of
atmospheric subtlety amid the wash of mere post-Templesmith murk that
prevails in many other parts of the indie-stry. Shifting the mood
expertly, Jon Adams & Rob Walton’s
“Party-Poohper” is an uproarious intellectual-property
farce told with a tight ensemble of off-duty cartoon icons in a
handful of deft Kurtzman-esque strokes (or stabs).
One of this volume’s clearest Eisner contenders is Jesse
Post & Fred Chao’s “The Greater Escape,” an
elegant parable of existential acceptance and resistance set in a
WWII prison camp within a mountaintop castle. The editors’
sense of pacing and variety is sharp, following this delicate
reflection with Jon Adams (again) & Robert Goodin’s
“Goodbye and Goodbye,” a gruesome burlesque on American
healthcare that’s just in time to be required reading for all
Town Hall hosts and participants.
J. Chris Campbell’s hilarious tyrannical-robot fairytale
“Yes I Can” is like a sardonic Schoolhouse Rock
for the way the political system really works. “Fight!!”
by Alex Robinson shows unsuspectedly rich possibilities for Jim
Starlin barbarian homages in the noncommercial comics dimension
(though I’m not sure they meant to print Page 69 upside-down,
or that it works if they did); while “Widows” has
gorgeous grisaille art by Salgood Sam yet a script by Rantz Hoseley
which shows that indie hands can produce even a brooding noir
psychological thriller where nothing really happens. Between Pat
Lewis’ “Secret Service Stupids” and Marcos
Perez’s “Bum Prom!” the book goes from brilliantly
nasty slapstick to transcendent surrealism, the former
self-explanatory from its title, the latter concerning a cartoon
dinosaur capering in hoboland (you’ll have to be there).
Grimm fairytales meet Ray Harryhausen in Miss Lasko-Gross’
“Follow That Frenchie!”, a lushly rendered
disenchanted-forest story that feels like the work of a much less
redemptive Eleanor Davis, and refreshingly so. In the next woods over
we wander into “Primal Time,” a solo Jon Adams’
despondently laff-riotous deflation of Maurice Sendak, with an
abandoned wild-child learning all the things he’s not free to
do and sheltering himself in the wondrous world of fantasy (which is
to say, terminal delusion). Playing off Lasko-Gross in different
ways, by sharing her rare skill for shaping and illuminating the raw
material of indie memoir, is Mariko Tomaki, Pete Friedrich & Lana
Pucci’s “Darren,” a great exploration of childhood
ambiguities and serendipitous (though subjective) connections between
impressions and events.
As usual, ISR’s own Charlito, Charly LaGreca, expands the
medium, this time by pushing the envelope of taste and pulling back
the veil on contested history with his snarky/creepy/deeply-felt
fragment from “The Infancy of Lil’ Yeshua.” The
compact storytelling imagination and unrestrained stylistic range and
immediacy are stunning. The other half of ISR’s executive
branch, “Mr. Phil” Jackson, navigates the tight, dark
corners of a troubling subject with masterful emotional economy and
narrative restraint in “The Walk,” a psychological
vignette of a traumatized man’s inner thoughts and outer
hallucinations that balances noirish suspense with lived-in character
study superbly.
Some single jokes and metaphors are too flimsy to support the
entire structure of a story – Sarah Glidden’s “The
Inconvenience” is an inert sitcom short about a guilty hipster
being followed around by solidified, seemingly sentient global
warming – but when the theme of obliviousness to current events
is stirred into a tidal wave of multi-textured absurdism as in Zach
Taylor’s “Clown Revolution,” one joke is worth a
thousand pages. Several gag cartoonists in Awesomer mistake
underachievement for brevity (like, ouch, last time’s
scholarship winner Chuck Forsman), but Chris Duffy shows anarchic wit
in “Kitty-Man and Mighty Boots,” and the
you-call-that-art spoof “Avant Garde” by Federico
Reggiani and Angel Mosquito made me fall out of my chair, which is a
lighter fate than what its hapless, involuntary protagonist suffers
for (someone else’s) art. Meanwhile, Michele Riganese’s
one-page talking-rocks-in-love tale “Tolly and June”
shows that the skilled minimal visionary can not just take a shortcut
to the funniest perspective but sort out the most essential elements
of truth and warmth.
Fringe comics admirably defy formula but sometimes unwisely
dispense with narrative; a few of the longer selections here intrigue
for a while with unusual character dynamics and original ideas but
then pull up short with cutesy stock endings (“Closer to
Spring” by Hilary Florido & Saicoink) or trail off into
non-event (“Boy Scout Troop 142” by Mike Dawson). But
Sean Ford, in “We Tell Ourselves,” has a wise, humane eye
for the suspended, melancholy moment of a life’s turning-point,
and Sabin Calvert’s shortcircuiting of the minotaur myth,
“Half Calf,” is formally daring and genuinely
heartwarming.
In a collection of this size, it’s inevitable that some
amount of material will be merely awesomeish. There’s a
quantity of conflicted-adventurer, vampire-girlfriend, zombie-mob
stuff, of both the shallowly dramatic and flatly funny-attempting
varieties, that the big bad mainstream is actually doing with more
depth as well as chops. And there will always be some over-chumminess
manifested in throwaway gags from cartoonists who are here mostly to
be here. Yet with this anthology’s passion for the artform and
its creators’ many gifts, you may be unawed by some, but
you’ll be amazed by most.
—CCdC—
Cover image used without explicit permission in accordance with the "Fair Use" provision of US copyright law.
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