The Rest of the Best

As you know, SOLRAD is up and running full steam. My list of the Best 20 comics of the decade is now live over there, so I’d encourage you to check it out.

One of the things I said in my intro is that there was a final pass list of over 100 books, which is true. Here are all the books that were considered but not chosen for my list.

I have a lot of love and affection for this whole set of comics, so this was very difficult for me. Regardless, I hope you enjoy my “rest of the best.”

The top 20 is in alphabetical order, and then 21-110 is separately alphabetized.

The Rest of the Best was originally published on Sequential State

What's Next @ Sequential State

Hey everyone!

It’s been quiet here at Sequential State. Let me tell you why.

Today, on January 1st, 2020, SOLRAD launched. SOLRAD is the culmination of over 9 months of work, and I hope it is positioned as a potential future vision for comics criticism and journalism in a world where critical discourse becomes harder to find. I’ve specifically built the entire website, and I hope you love the way it works.

SOLRAD takes a lot of the things I’ve learned over the past 15+ years and combines them. It is a culmination of what I’ve learned about the web from being a freelance writer, to being a publisher for a small gaming magazine, to designing and building Sequential State through multiple iterations on Tumblr, and then WordPress.

In addition to being a critic for SOLRAD, I’m also the website’s publisher. That means I’m in charge of making sure the site works on a daily basis and new content gets posted when its supposed to. That’s a lot of work. Unfortunately that means that I won’t have as much time as I have had in the past to work specifically for Sequential State. I’ll still be publishing work on SOLRAD and other places as I see fit, and still plan to be an active critic. But the vast amount of work that I have been doing for Sequential State will slow down.

There will be occasional posts on the site, and my work will be archived here for posterity. But I hope you will follow me to my new home at SOLRAD. I think you’ll love what I’ve made with the help of others, and hope that you will find it a better, fuller vision of what comics criticism can look like in 2020 and beyond.

Thank you for your kindness and support over the last 5+ years. I’ll see you soon.

What’s Next @ Sequential State was originally published on Sequential State

Review: The Man Who Came Down the Attic Stairs by Celine Loup

The first you notice about The Man Who Came Down the Attic Stairs is the beauty of Loup’s illustration and the setting for the comic. Each page is stunning, an impressive use of inking and toning. Loup uses a delicate line to great effect, and the ink washes throughout the book are effective at conveying its menacing tone. Loup’s images are often jawdropping, both for how expressive they are, and how oppressive they feel. Much of that oppression comes from Loup’s powerful lettering. Anyone with a colicky newborn knows how bad the wailing can get, but in The Man Who Came Down the Attic Stairs it’s worse – Roslin seems to be attuned to some unnatural force from the attic nursery, and never seems to stop crying. The lettering of those cries is everywhere, crowding the page and making the reader claustrophobic and unsettled.

Loup manages to pack a lot into a very short comic, and ramps up the tension over time, until it reaches a screaming point. Thematically, the book interrogates postpartum depression, and the weight of raising a child alone while being expected to manage a household without help. We see Emma under enormous pressure to comply with a misogynist standard emphasized by the era in which the comic is set. Thomas wants an immaculate house, a beautiful wife, dinner on the table when he gets home from work, to have no hand in their childrearing, and to have sex whenever he wants. At the beginning of the book, Thomas is more attentive to Emma, but it’s clear that he sees her only as a means to his own ends. And while yes, this is a period piece, Loup clearly demands that readers reflect on their own time and lived experiences.

To some extent, The Man Who Came Down the Attic Stairs is also about twilight sleep, a form of pain management used in obstetrics between 1899 and the 1960s. During the timeframe that The Man Who Came Down the Attic Stairs is set, childbirth was considered pathologic and unnatural, and the majority male obstetrics and gynecology community had wide disdain for the female body. The drugs used in this procedure left women in a dissociated state, and impaired the mother’s ability to bond with her child. In this state, women would often thrash on the delivery bed, injuring themselves so much that they had to be restrained and wrapped with blinders and cushions. At one point Emma calls herself “an unnatural thing” for not feeling love for her child, but the doctors who were supposed to help her have irreparably harmed her, and her relationship with her daughter. It’s also heavily implied that Thomas himself is an obstetrician, and that he may have delivered Roslin, which further complicates the historical truth and the personal truth of the story.

Another key theme of The Man Who Came Down the Attic Stairs is Emma’s isolation. Emma is isolated by her husband’s purchase of an ancient mansion, kept from the rest of the people in town. What looks palatial in the first scenes of the book reveals itself as a beautiful prison. She’s so busy with housework and overwhelmed by Roslin’s crying that she can’t seem to have time for any other relationships. When she begs her husband for help, he sends her to a psychiatrist rather than change a dirty diaper. The psychiatrist is clearly working under Thomas’ orders, because he’s not even charting her case; his writing of her mental condition is just scribbles on a blank page. Men are the only people she is sanctioned to see by her husband, and the only people she physically attacks are female. (That’s another echo of the way patriarchal systems damage women, by pitting them against one another. This theme reverberates throughout much of Loup’s work.)

10/21/19 – 6:30 PM EST EDIT: In an after review comment on the work on Twitter, I learned from Celine herself that one of my deeply held convictions about The Man Who Came Down the Attic Stairs was not readily expressed by most critics. So I’ll be blunt about it. There’s a clear thread throughout the book, sensation of doubt. There’s a reasonable question to ask about whether or not Emma is a reliable narrator. There’s a reading of the comic that suggests that she’s psychotic, that everything that happens in the book is all in her head. But that reading runs against the grain of all of the thematic work that Loup has built on in The Man Who Came Down the Attic Stairs, and in my view is a false choice. In my reading, Emma is the only adult character you should trust. The things that happen, however terrible they are, do happen.

So yes, The Man Who Came Down the Attic Stairs is about postpartum depression, but it’s also about misogynist violence against women. It’s the kind of violence that rarely leaves physical wounds. Thomas’ demands of her, and then his treatment of her when he doesn’t get what he wants, is unpardonable. That violence culminates in an ending that is unforgettable.

And, after reading The Man Who Came Down the Attic Stairs a few times, I think the ending is what sticks with me the most. It’s bleak, brutal, and it’s heartbreaking. It tears at the fabric of you. With The Man Who Came Down the Attic Stairs, Loup delivers a fantastic, unsettling, uncompromising vision of the horror inherent in the violence against women. You won’t be disappointed.

If you enjoyed this review and want to support the work of comics criticism internationally, please support my latest venture, Fieldmouse Press. Fieldmouse Press is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit comics press, run by a group of talented, experienced critics. We’re collecting donations to launch our first publishing project, SOLRAD, in January 2020, and we could use your assistance. All donations are tax-deductible. Thanks!

Review: The Man Who Came Down the Attic Stairs by Celine Loup was originally published on Sequential State

Review: Bad Gateway by Simon Hanselmann

Welcome back, dear reader. On Monday, I ran an interview with Simon Hanselmann that I hope you take the time to read. The initial focus of the interview (although it ended up being fairly far-ranging) was Hanselmann’s latest graphic novel, Bad Gateway. Clocking in at 176 pages, Bad Gateway is Hanselmann’s latest collection of Megg & Mogg comics. Unlike his last two books, Bad Gateway moves past the ending of Megahex, where Owl moves out after being sexually assaulted by Werewolf Jones. Bad Gateway, a reference to gateway drugs, is therefore also another type of gateway – a gateway to the more harrowing, darker material that Hanselmann has been promising for years.

As if to signify that change in focus and tone, Bad Gateway is also physically different from Hanselmann’s previous collections. Bad Gateway is an impressive print object; the book has gold foil on the cover, black gilding, a sticker, and is a much larger book than the first 3 volumes. Instead of reducing the material, Bad Gateway is printed at the size that Hanselmann is working, which is similar to his European album editions. And that size increase is a net benefit, because Hanselmann’s illustration is better than it has ever been, and his paintings, which appear as spreads throughout the book, are breathtaking in their detail and complexity.  Hanselmann’s art continues to improve book over book, and the new size makes that more clear. With a series like Megg and Mogg, sometimes the art seems to all slide together. It’s almost easier to think about like a newspaper comic, constant and unchanging. But going back to the original Megahex, it’s clear how much Hanselmann has grown as an artist. 

In terms of plot, there’s a lot going on, generally centered around the aftermath of Owl’s sudden departure from the home. Werewolf Jones moves into his old room, and things start to fall apart around Megg and Mogg. Both characters are in a bad place in their relationship together, and Jones is a chaos agent addicted to hard drugs. Hanselmann vacillates between gross out jokes, bong rips, and deadpan humor on one side, with an upsetting, voyeuristic view of Megg’s depression and the drug haze that surrounds her on the other.  

Drawing contrasts between Hanselmann’s previous work and Bad Gateway can be challenging. To a certain extent, the Megg and Mogg comics are like a long-running television dramady. But things are changing. Hanselmann is getting more serious, more honest, more real. There was always a sense in the first three books that things were getting out of hand, but were mostly going to be fine. No longer. Werewolf Jones’ influence on the house leads to some dramatic and heartbreaking moments. Megg sells childhood possessions for drug money. There’s an overdose in the house. We even see a piece of Megg’s teenage years, in a flashback that hints at the things that are coming in future installments of the series.

It’s also clear that Hanselmann’s work on Bad Gateway is a direct reflection on his lived experience. There’s a clear corollary between Megg’s relationship with her mother and his own relationship with his mom. While much of it is played for laughs, there’s a clear sense that Bad Gateway is partially the result of Hanselmann processing his upbringing and his own personal traumas. 

In the past, I’ve liked Hanselmann’s Megg and Mogg comics, but with Amsterdam and One More Year, I felt like I had been kept in a holding pattern. I wanted things to change, I wanted the dam to break. Bad Gateway smashes that feeling. And now that I’ve gotten what I asked for, I’m not sure how I feel about it. The change I’ve been waiting for is here, but it’s more stark and more harrowing than I ever expected. It hurts in ways I didn’t think it could. Bad Gateway is Hanselmann hitting a new peak – it’s clearly his best work yet. But it’s a dark place to start a journey, which is going to go to deeper depths. I’ll be here for all of it, until the last page is done. But I won’t lie; I’m dreading it.

If you enjoyed this review and want to support the work of comics criticism internationally, please support my latest venture, Fieldmouse Press. Fieldmouse Press is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit comics press, run by a group of talented, experienced critics. We’re collecting donations to launch our first publishing project, SOLRAD, in January 2020, and we could use your assistance. All donations are tax-deductible. Thanks!

Review: Bad Gateway by Simon Hanselmann was originally published on Sequential State

Interview: Simon Hanselmann - "My greatest wish is that I could freeze time."

I sat down with Simon Hanselmann at the Small Press Expo this year in North Bethesda, Maryland to talk about Bad Gateway, his latest graphic novel. Published by Fantagraphics earlier this year, Bad Gateway advances the plot of his Megg and Mogg comics past the events that appear in his first graphic novel Megahex. It’s a harder book to stomach than anything that’s come before. It’s darker and more honest. It’s also his most accomplished storytelling yet. Hanselmann and I had a wide-ranging conversation about his comics, his past, and his plans for the series.

Today is also the first day of public fundraising for Fieldmouse Press, the 501(c)(3) charity nonprofit I help run. Fieldmouse Press will launch its first project on January 1st, 2020, called SOLRAD. SOLRAD will be a comics journalism hub focused on the comics arts, and will be the new home for my writing, among a slate of diverse, insightful writers. If you enjoy this interview, or the other writing on Sequential State, please pledge your support. All donations are tax-deductible.

Alex Hoffman (AH): When was the last time you were at SPX? Was it two years ago?

Simon Hanselmann (SH): Yeah, in 2017. For One More Year.

AH: I guess that’s a good place to start, if any. One More Year is kind of like the end of the original Megg & Mogg trilogy. It sets up Bad Gateway in a way, doesn’t it?

SH: Sort of, It’s all out of order. I’m like George R.R. Martin, I’m behind on everything. In the strip Werewolf Jones dies in 2017, and now it’s almost 2020. He’s still alive. Probably still will be for two more books. It takes longer to paint, and I’m just behind. But yeah, I guess it’s a trilogy. I’d suggest people probably read One More Year first, then Amsterdam, then Megahex. At the end of Megahex Owl moves out and the events of those three books are all concurrent. I’ve said before that they’re expansion campaigns, and if you like Megahex, try the other books. They all add more backstory. And right now, it’s all come to a head in Bad Gateway.

AH: Bad Gateway is noticeably different as a book than the previous three; it’s in a bigger format, more “Euro size.” Is that a decision you made early in the process of making this book?

SH: Yeah it was pretty early. I wanted to differentiate it from the older books. And I liked my European editions and the larger size. Maybe I felt more confident in my artwork. I tend to think things look better reduced a little bit. But there’s a school of thought that the size it’s made is  perfect. And it is printed the size it was drawn. Which kind of makes it like an artist’s edition as well, a 2-for-1 kind of package. Because I don’t do any computer manipulation at all. The pages look almost exactly the same. The paper textures are scrubbed off a bit and cleaned up by the production staff at Fantagraphics. So yeah, it kind of functions as an artist’s edition.

AH: It’s a beautiful edition, the black gilding. It’s clearly a very nice production.

SH: I was happy with it. They let me have foil and a sticker. The new print buyer [at Fantagraphics] is amazing. She saved a lot of money on the book. She’s found some great deals and I was allowed to play with it a bit more. I’m always suggesting crazy ideas. I wanted to have the musical birthday card technology.

AH: Oh, yeah! *Alex laughs*

SH: So you open it and certain musical passage plays and there are sounds. But it was too expensive. I’ve always wanted to play with acetate. I’m trying to get some orange acetate [for the next book].

AH: I want to go back to your 2017 interview with Dan Nadel at TCJ. At the time you told him that you think all your work is terrible. I wanted to ask if that’s still the case. Do you still think of your work as terrible?

SH: Yeah, I think so. I’m very critical of my work, I don’t think it’s the best. I think it’s passible. And I like it enough to keep doing it. Most artists I think must look at their work and just see the mistakes. And hopefully readers breeze through it, can decipher the panels easily, process it, and enjoy reading it. But yeah, I see all the mistakes because I stare at it every day. It’s painful to look at, and it’s not what I want it to be. I’m not a natural artist. I don’t think I have any inherent skill.

AH: Really?

SH: I just I like to write little stories. I used to do these little puppet shows as a kid and little video stop motion things. The writing is my favorite part of Megg and Mogg. They’re theatrical animal characters on the stage, shooting blinds back and forth and reacting and that’s the process I enjoy. I think I would probably thrive in a TV writers’ room with a brain trust. Like HTMLflowers (Grant Jonathon) does a lot of writing with me. We bounce ideas back and forth. We get each other, we have the same energy.

But yeah, Bad Gateway. I got it done. 2764 hours.

AH: You kept track.

SH: I don’t know why I started doing that.

AH: Just kind of a check mark, I guess? Or a tally?

SH: Yeah. I wanted to do that for a while, to just sit down and work on the thing. I wanted to start this story earlier but I didn’t want to do it on Vice because I didn’t want to serialize it.

AH: Right, because you would have had to.

SH: I didn’t want to have to make these concise bite-sized self-contained shorts that also add neatly to a greater whole. That’s very difficult to do.

AH: Sure.

SH: I just wanted to sit down and do it as one big movie, one big project. [Daniel] Clowes had done that with Patience and I was jealous of Dan because he gets to take his time. “Patience.” I’d never had that option in the past.

I went back to Vice because Alvin [Buenaventura] died owing me $10,000. I was like “Fuck, I have to go back to Vice.” Vice was great for my career. It got me off welfare. As you know, Nick Gazin gets a lot of flack, but he did get a lot of good cartoonists on there. I think he did a lot of good. He got a lot of people paid.

AH: Yeah, that’s a fair point.

SH: With all the old alt-weeklies gone, and printing dead, there’s not many avenues out there. Nick Gazin got me off welfare. And he had Anya Davidson, Anna Haifisch, etc. That’s where The Artist came from. Vice Comics was great.

AH: That “vertical,” or whatever you want to call it, paid a lot of good cartoonists good money. Nick is his own story, we don’t have to talk about him.

SH: That list was shit. He should have put some women on the list!

AH: Right!

SH: He published Leslie Stein on [Vice] he should have put her book on there!

AH: Right! Right.

SH: He goofed. It wasn’t malicious or anything on his part but-

AH: -maybe he smoked a little too much weed and wrote the list at the last second.

SH: I don’t think he smoked any weed! And his apartment is super clean. I stayed at Nick’s once and expected it to be filthy but he’s got a cat, lonely man with a cat, and it was impeccably clean and it smelled amazing.

AH: That’s not what I expected.

SH:No, he defies expectations when you least expect it.

AH: Going back to this idea of not thinking of yourself as a spectacular artist. Do you feel in a certain way that your work is outsider art? Does that even make sense?

SH: Yeah, I mean, it does in a way. I mean, I grew up in Tasmania, I started making zines when I was eight years old without any prompting, without ever having seen a zine before. My friend would bootleg little drawings and try and sell them and then we were like, “Oh, we can make something on these. We can make comics.” And I’m still doing the same thing. I’m still making zines and doing all these different deals with different publishers around the world, but it’s independent, I retain all the rights and I still run my own shit. So it’s still outsider art, really. I’m still making little Xerox pamphlets. 

AH: Right. 

SH: You know, it’s become a thing now. I mean, I’m growing as a brand, frankly. 

AH: Yeah, you can tell.

SH: I’m talking to TV people and stuff. And I’m trying to churn the work out try and keep the quality there. And yeah, grow the characters and make a point about addiction and shit. “Life.”

AH: You talk about how you want the art to be passable, as it as though it’s just a vehicle for the story. And to a certain extent it is, but I think one of the things that I noticed with the new book is how Bad Gateway is by far your most technically proficient work. The paintings at the beginning and the end are breathtaking.

SH: I liked them when I did them but now I hate them.

AH: Yeah? Why?

SH: I think my paintings are staid. My painting hasn’t evolved. I feel like I did better paintings, or they had a better effect back in 2000. It’s stuff you’ve never seen before. But it’s fine. I’m just  critical. I think that’s healthy. I mean, sometimes I read [my work] and I’m like, “that’s a good one.” And I love the characters. But sometimes I’m just like, “ugh.” And I honestly don’t stress about it too much because it’s about the writing for me. It’s about getting it done. So I work a lot and I put a lot into it. And I leave the mistakes in.

AH: Well the techniques and materials you’re using, they don’t really allow for you to cover things up, right? You’re using food coloring, watercolor-

SH: Yeah, food color, watercolor, and gouache. I pencil the page, I ink it with Micron-type pens; it’s a Unipin, a different type. Less slippery. Then I rub the pencils out and color. So I can’t use any white corrective fluids. They’ll soak up the pigment or any other color layer, so I just have to live with all mistakes.Which makes it dangerous. It’s always like a walk on the wild side with every panel. I can, and usually do, fuck it up. So it teaches you to live with your mistakes and just move on to the next thing.

AH: I’m not trying to diagnose you, but it seems to me that you have kind of an obsessive quality about the way you make art.

SH: Oh absolutely. I am an obsessive. It’s kind of sick. 

AH: So if you had you had the option to go back and fix things, then you might spend hundreds of hours just trying to revise it, to make it perfect.

SH: My greatest wish is that I could freeze time. So I could just make these things where I want them to be. Get them perfect, use the most dramatic lighting possible, just get better and learn. But what’s the fucking point? The nihilist to me is like it’s all going to landfill in the future. I’ll be dead. Who gives a fuck? 

AH: Well-

SH: It’s just fun. That’s fun. Now it’s me and Grant, we have fun writing the strip and make a bit of scratch from it. And we meet a lot of nice people through it. And it has a therapeutic outlet. It’s life and it’s all I’ve ever known.

AH: But I mean, you can be a nihilist and you can say “Ah, who gives a shit, because everybody’s gonna die.” But actually, you change people in the moment.

SH: Well that’s always my follow up. We’re living now. And what we need to do is take care of our friends and families and make everything as sweet as we can right now. Make things comfortable for people. Have a nice time and be nice to each other. But in the back of your mind…

AH: And that’s a that’s an impulse you kind of fight against in Bad Gateway a little bit, isn’t it?

SH: How so?

AH: One of the things I think is fascinating about Bad Gateway, is that while it is nihilistic and depressing, it’s written in a way that shows the humanity of the characters. You’re saying things in ways that you’ve never said them before. And in that sense, I think Bad Gateway is your most honest piece of work to date.

SH: Yes, it’s more dramatic than the other stuff. I’ve tried to write a more cohesive story and try to make people feel these feelings. Eleanor Davis was just saying on our panel that [when she is making art] she is trying to take a feeling that she felt and convey that to the reader. Make the reader feel that feeling. Find the best way to do that. It was beautiful. That’s what I’m doing. I’m trying to take these fucked up moments and present them in this way that’s cathartic for me and put a few jokes in it too.

AH: Yeah, and I mean you’re going to put in the bong rips or whatever. But then you’ve got those moments – like I specifically think of a couple of moments in the book where Werewolf Jones is trying to live his life and hold down a job and not get high. 

SH: Yeah he has a sober phase.

AH: Yeah. And in that moment, something clicks.Throughout Megg, Mogg, and Owl, he’s a chaos agent and comes in and he like, fucks everything up.

SH: Yeah, he’s a mess.

AH: And in that moment, you don’t let the reader have the satisfaction of saying, “Oh, this guy’s just just a complete and utter fuckup all the time. He’s just a plot device. He’s just a thing.” In that moment, you show Werewolf Jones as this human person dealing with some really fucked up shit. And he’s not perfect but he’s trying to live his life.

SH: In the previous trilogy, he expressed two instances of empathy. Two rare instances. So it’s there, he’s a human being. He’s based on numerous people I’ve known, horrible parts of myself, impulses. He’s the id, the id unleashed. 

AH: Hmm.

SH: Someone in Seattle wrote a great piece for The Stranger about Werewolf Jones and how he can guide you with how far people can go. How long you keep people in your life before you cast them away and say, “That’s too much.” It was speaking to rehabilitation, the prison system, second chances, cancel culture, all that shit and I found that interesting. 

He’s this unchecked omnisexual force of nature. He is fucking up but he’s human. People see themselves in him. People come up to me with Werewolf Jones tattoos. People of all types like Werewolf Jones. But my wife fucking hates him. She’s revolted by him. She can’t wait for him to die. But I love him, and people like him. He’s going through some shit and he’s heading towards an early death, and it’s very sad that he doesn’t change.

AH: Yeah it is. 

SH: You know, Megg, I think there’s hope for her. As a character that people have grown to feel for or love. People tell me that they do love her. People want her to get out of it. I feel like in a way there’s [a blurring of] perception now, like what’s the difference between  fictional characters and people that we know, especially online people? We grow attached to these characters. I’ve been doing this like 11 years now. People fucking love these characters. So I hope Megg can get out of it. Werewolf Jones doesn’t. I’m excited to show you in the future. Owl trying, being away with a whole new group of friends. But we’ll see his downfall.

AH: There’s something really fascinating about the construction of knowing that Werewolf Jones will die. There’s almost a fatality to the character – not in the way that he acts, but our perceptions of his actions throughout the book. We see things spiral downward in Bad Gateway we see what could possibly be his death-

SH: Yeah, the fakeout! I knew the hardcores would all be like, “Ah, this is it!” But no, he’s back up, more stuff!

AH: And he screams! He rages out of the house. But that moment feels predestined, and it feels like you spend the book waiting for that moment when it’s going to happen.

SH: I think people are expecting it. And, I mean, it’s 2019. I did that other “Christmas 2019” strip that kind of changed things and no one commented. I thought maybe some nerds on Reddit or something would say, “Look, he’s changed it.” Because in the original “Christmas 2017,” Werewolf Jones dies of an overdose at Booger’s house. In the newer comic it is mentioned that he’s found under a bridge. A friend of mine died, my bandmate, he passed away and that’s how he was found. So now I want to write about that. He was one of my best friends and so I think I wanted to change it [the WWJ death] a bit. The original strip was based on a friend of my mother’s that wanted to stay at our house and then had an overdose at someone else’s house. My mother had a lot of guilt about it I wanted to harness that kind of thing, write about that. The car and bridge stuff makes it a bit more personal. 

I think people were expecting to happen but I faked them out.

AH: I think this is where we start  to get into your relationship with your mom, in a more real way. You’ve referenced this in the past and it’s come up in interviews in the past.

SH: I’m too open.

AH: If you were open before, now you’re like open heart surgery – you’re a chest cracked open.

SH: I haven’t shown her this book. I put this off for a long time. This book is basically Megg’s Coven, what I’ve been promising for years and what I started in 2012. I was serializing it in a friend’s newsprint thing, I did four chapters of it, but it’s different now. Then I put it off for a long time because of the Vice stuff and I because I knew it would really hurt my mother. I think maybe I was waiting for her to pass. Just a few months ago she had an overdose. I was just about to get on a plane to go to Spain and found out, and I was like, “Oh my God.” Then I flew for 26 hours and traveled door-to-door to a TV studio and was put on Spanish TV. So I ended up talking about it during the interview, and made a lot of jokes as well, dark jokes about my mother.  

And she makes dark jokes too; she’s a funny lady. She’s a smart, caring lady and she’s always dealt with this stuff with humor. but yeah, I grew up around junkies, junkie folk and you see them destroy themselves. You also see the way the drug and alcohol system works [in Tasmania]. I want to write about the system and stuff like that, how they process these people because I’ve tried to sue the Department of Health and Human Services for care for my mother and to get her into rehab. Sometimes it seems like all the drug and alcohol workers there are desensitized, like the people who put bullets into cows’ brains are desensitized. 

*Hanselmann sighs* I’m getting upset.

AH: But in a way this is emblematic of the way that you and Grant Jonathon (HTMLflowers) have a sort of symbiosis. You see in his work grappling with healthcare as a human right.

SH: His chronic illness.

AH: And the desensitized healthcare worker and the crux of his work, that healthcare for pay is eugenics.

SH: And he’s exploring family stuff now too. What his mother did, moving the family from Chicago to Melbourne, her sacrifices and the guilt they share.

AH: True.

SH: Between my mother and I, there is just so much guilt and so much manipulation going on. On the parent’s part. Not on purpose I think. Grant and I just get each other. I don’t know. We’re very different in so many ways, but also just like brothers. Best friends for 12-13 years.

AH: You can kind of see some of that coming out in Chrome Halo, his album, when was that 2017, 2018?

SH: Yeah, I think so. He got nominated for the Australian Music Awards for that. Most of those songs are about Becky and Oscar [Key Sung] and I was quite jealous. I was like, “Where is my song? Where’s the song about our friendship?” Because he’s written all these songs about friendship, about Oscar his bandmate in that project. I know for a fact that we’re better friends. So It’s a bit frustrating. He did write a song for me once though when I moved to London in 2008. He wrote a very sad ballad about riding his bike alone at night and how all my shit was gone. He sat alone in my empty room. It’s a beautiful song. 

I’m concerned about his health. We just talked the other day. He’s trying to get his lung transplant.

AH: Yeah. 

SH: He’s gotta stop doing that party boy stuff. He’s depressed and they won’t give him legal weed. He just wants to draw his comics and he works too hard and he parties too hard.

AH: That’s a link too, isn’t it? The way you both work yourselves too hard.

SH: Oh yeah, to the bone!

AH: Didn’t you say somewhere that you were working 16-hour days?

SH: Yeah. For the first seven months of last year I did eight hours a day. Jacq would go to work in the morning so I was working office hours. She’d get home, I was being a normal human being, we’d have dinner, we’d watch TV, we’d tend to our pets, do family business. Have a nice time. But the last five months I came up on the deadline and thought, “shit.”  I crunched the numbers and thought I was going to do okay. I didn’t travel that year, just went to Italy for a week, was full time working on the book. But the deadline was looming. So in that five months I started putting in like 16-18 hour days nonstop. It was hard for Jacq you know? 

AH: Yeah, absolutely.

SH: It was hard to be a present spouse. But she also works for my publisher so at the same time she’s like, “I know you have to finish and we don’t want to fuck up the book.” It was rough going and the material was difficult as well. I found out my dad was dying throughout the course of doing the book. Dying of cancer. I still don’t talk to him, we haven’t talked for years. He’s a dicey, weird guy. 

At the same time, the house that I draw in Bad Gateway was demolished as well, the house I draw when I go back to the origin of Megg and her mother. That house was the gateway in the title, it’s a reference to gateway drugs. It’s funny, my grandmother was born in that house. It used to be a maternity hospital and then it was converted into flats. I lived there when I was a baby. We moved away, but we moved back in my teenage years. My cats are buried there. It was demolished at the same time I was building this recreation of it from photos and memory.  Trying to put things back together, like that’s where mother’s jewelry box was and that’s where this little ceramic hippo was that I made in school. I was trying to remember all these little details and at the same time it was being demolished. It’s some heavy stuff.

AH: It’s the impermanence of time, right? Everything, moves forward. Everything.

SH: It’s the kind of artsy wanky bullshit I like to think about.

AH: Yeah? 

SH: I’m a depressive person. But I’m very happy now. I don’t need therapy anymore, or at least I don’t feel the need for it. I found great friends, great love, and success with this Megg and Mogg thing and I find that very fulfilling. I think my problem in the past was I just wanted everyone to fuck off and leave me alone. So I could just work on these comics. I have to work on these things. 

AH: Kind of therapeutic right? 

SH: It is completely. I say that all the time, art therapy. I don’t give a shit about all the stuff I just love doing it. Obviously I love making money so I can buy my mother groceries, survive in a Seattle that’s being choked by Amazon. 

AH: Right? 

SH: It’s not the Seattle that I heard about. So I make no bones about enjoying making money from this. I like that I can sell things online and have it in 15 languages and travel to festivals and have a great time with it. Success is great. And you try not to let it get to your head.

I was talking to Dan Nadel in that interview you mentioned, going on about all this travel and hardcore shit. And he’s like, “It’s just comics. What are you talking about? You sound like an idiot.” But think about it like this – you grew up really poor in these weird environments. And suddenly you’re getting a ton of fucking money, thousands of dollars. Grant and I were going out and buying new shoes every day, gold chains and other stupid shit. Blowing money like crazy and get flown all over the world. 

AH: Tell me more about that. 

SH: In 2015 I did something like 10 countries. It was really fucking rock and roll, really fucking hardcore. And I had just gotten married. Jacq and I were kept apart. And like, it was a crazy fucking year, a real mind fuck. It was as rock and roll as you can get in comics. I guess it’s better than being mopey out at the festival, hiding behind your mustache and saying, “Aww, I can’t sell any books!  No one cares about my old autobiographical ramblings.” It’s better than that.

AH: Could talk about the idea of making your comics into a brand? You’re making these mini comics in high demand, short runs. You’re printing them, you’re painting a little bit on by hand, maybe, and then selling them online in a “catch it if you can” sort of way. And if you don’t, you don’t.

SH: It’s like a Supreme drop. I follow that model [from the fashion industry].

AH: So that’s where that comes from?

SH: And also I like the rarity of it, It harkens back to when I used to go to record fairs and I find like a 7-inch or something that I’d been searching for all year, pre-eBay. There are no computers, you’re at the bottom of the earth, and at the record fair you find that rare thing. It’s got a B-side on it, you love that band! You love them! You found this fucking B-side that you heard about from a friend of a friend, and no one had a cassette. It was special when we used to go out looking for shit. And I like digital fine. I used to put stuff online all the time. But I like creating these ephemeral objects. 

AH: Yeah, they are like that.

SH: You know, Frank Santoro got in trouble at CXC selling people’s mini comics at inflated prices. 

AH: Yeah? 

SH: I mean, I think they banned [from the show] and I just disagree. People were like, “Just give them to some kids or something.” But I like that he’s attaching value to our stuff. Someone has to! 

AH: Right. 

SH: I see great artists like Gabriel Bell selling sketches for like $20 online. I’ve decided I’m playing the gallery market. I mean, my shit sells for like three grand a page, like five grand for a painting. I’m selling to heiresses, French women in hexagonal glasses. But I say that we put in so much work [as cartoonists] and we need to value ourselves. People can pay $10 for a coffee or beer, they can pay $10 for something. I busted my fucking ass on this thing, I put a lot into it, I worked until my thumbs were bleeding. And people say, “Well, it’s just a 32-page pamphlet.” But people charge like 30-50 bucks for a print! My zine has 32 pages, with 12 images on every page. That’s so many prints, you do the math! Why do people not respect a collection of images in that form? So I charge 10 bucks for a zine. And people complain, they tell me, “that’s too much.” No, it’s not.

AH: If it sells, it’s not too much.

SH: It’s weird, there’s this dichotomy. Like, I hate myself and I hate my work and I’m very critical. But also with the business, I’m like, no, no, no, these objects have value. You go to zine fairs and so many people want to give you their books for free and it’s like, no, let me pay you money, spread it around. Value yourself.

AH: Right? And perhaps this comes from a mentality of scarcity? Growing up in the 80s where you couldn’t get work easily. And you grew up in Tasmania, so it’s like you really couldn’t get shit- 

SH: But we had shit!

AH: Really? That’s wild, I couldn’t get anything.

SH: But also the Internet has made everything so available, and there’s so much that’s available that you don’t know what to get. 

AH: Right, that’s a great point. 

SH: Back in the old days, Clowes and Bagg were selling like 200,000 copies or something like that. Some crazy astronomical number. Their floppies! Yeah, getting comics at record stores and head shops. People needed content. And more people we’re reading comics, I think. And now even after the graphic novel boom, The Guardian Book Award, The Booker Prize, the ubiquitousness of the Marvel films, now that graphic novels are cool, it still seems like alt comics were selling more back in the late 90s. I found everything in Tasmania, European comics, British comics, American comics. I was 13 years old buying Hate and Eightball off the shelves. That doesn’t happen anymore. 

AH: But you had to go and find the thing back then – you had to find it, and then buy it. Then the internet comes along and dramatically changes everything. But you’ve decided to go back to that scarcity model.

SH: Yeah. There are downsides. It is frustrating because I see people selling copies on eBay for $100 and I’ve had to cut people off. They’re buying 20 copies and I’m suspicious that they’ve got that many friends [that want the book]. They’re not just pooling together for the shipping costs.

AH: Right.

SH: They’re just buying and hawking them, and that’s not cool. I’m actually going to collect all that stuff next year. I’m doing a collection of 350 pages of the zines and the odds and ends [link]. So it will be accessible – which destroys my whole 7-inch scarcity thing, but there will be things left out. The covers won’t be in there, a lot of highlights and the handmade aspect will be missing, but the bulk of the stuff will be there.

AH: Will that be out from Fantagraphics as well?

SH: Yeah. I figure it’s a good strategy to have a midyear book in between Bad Gateway and Megg’s Coven, just to remind people that Megg and Mogg still exists. In this Netflix kind of culture where we stream and demand constant entertainment, who’s got the time to wait two years for book? I don’t want them to forget about me.

AH: It’s fascinating that we have this binge and purge kind of media landscape. It seems to me that’s not a way that comics can exist, really.

SH: No, not for a single creator or for alt comics. People have to be patient. You have to be part of the scene and follow people. I’ll always be there for the next Charles Burns book, you know, the next thing from whatever artist that I loved as a youth. The stuff that you really connect with, you’ll generally always stick with it. There are bands that I think are awful now but out of duty or something I still listen to them sometimes. They feel like old friends, although they embarrass me now, but I still want to know what they’re up to.

AH: But it’s like human connection right? Circling back around to what we were discussing earlier, we create these connections with people even if we don’t know them very well, but if their work speaks to us in ways-

SH: We project onto them. But they become the soundtracks of our lives. There are so many comics from my youth that mean so much to me, that really inform my idea of relationships and politics. I was probably too young to be reading a lot of stuff. I was 13 and reading Clowes and Julie Doucet.

AH: Maybe that is too young? But I don’t actually think so. It seems to me that the media landscape has gotten harsher, that the internet makes it easier for teens to see really heinous things.

SH: Yeah, and honestly, I was smoking weed at eight years old and grew up around all these hardcore fucking people, criminals and whatever, so reading a Julie Doucet comic is probably pretty low on the list of harmful things you can get into. *laughs*

AH: One thing I’ve wanted to ask about the zines you make – do you feel that in those comics, you could be more open? Or even, maybe more vulnerable because they had a limited audience?

SH: I mean, you’re a lot freer in that arena. I made a “Me Too” joke in one of them last year. I thought it was a positive joke. I didn’t think it was really making fun of women. I was making fun of men kind of like, you know, Owl being an overly nervous man who is like, “What am I going to do now? This is ruining dating!” But people could interpret it as me making fun of the whole movement, which I support. The movement is great as a whole, especially outing predators. 

AH: Yes. 

SH: But yeah, fuck it I went there, I made this “Me Too” joke and I allowed myself to riff on that moment, and that’s dangerous these days. All this Chappelle controversy recently. There have been a lot of good discussions recently about comedy. It’s interesting. I consider myself a comedy writer.

AH: Yeah?

SH: But yeah, I allow myself a bit of freedom in the zines. I figure it’s a core audience, and they’ll probably get what I’m going for and realize I’m not alt-right. Someone called me that online, [a person] I thought would have known better. But things are more and more political. I hate having to discuss politics all the time, but these are politically charged times. It comes up quite easily.

AH: Do you think that the Internet has made satire and sarcasm less effective?

SH: It’s changing language and things are evolving, and they’re evolving rapidly. And it’s like preservatives, or vaping; we’re not sure what they’re doing to the human body. What is all this information doing? You know, this constant pipeline of information, I read that some scientists think that it’s affecting empathy in young children. That the barrage of information led to them not grasping full concepts of things. I don’t know.

AH: In some ways that pipeline is an addiction, right? Let’s go ahead and move that direction. We’re all addicted, right? To our phones-

SH: It’s fun! It’s like Star Trek, it’s fun! *laughs*

AH: And some of its more benign, and some of its not. And you’ve got very young people, toddlers, glued to cell phones-

SH: But who knows, maybe it’s good, maybe this will end up making people smart and full of knowledge and they’ll figure things out. 

On a serious and controversial note, the saddest thing about cell phone culture is toilet books. 

AH: Yeah? *laughs*

SH: It’s true! They’re going away! No one reads books in the toilet any more. Everyone just looks at their phone. 

AH: Yeah, that’s true! 

SH: So many great little Peanuts paperbacks. Classic toilet books. I had a copy of Archie when I was young, called “A Date with Archie” and I changed the name to “A Shit with Archie.” I still love that joke. I think we need to get books back into toilets. I sign a lot of toilet books. It’s heartening. I look at the books at my signings and I can see flecks of urine on the books. Honestly it warms my heart.

AH: I think there is something to said about a book that’s so unputdownable that you have to take it into the bathroom with you. If something ends up in the bathroom, that means you’re in a place where you want to be alone with it, where no one else can bother you. That’s something that’s really kind of special.

SH: And you can always look at other people’s toilet books. I visited Anne Simon’s house in Paris a few months ago and she had an amazing collection of toilet books and small sculptures. She’s still doing that. It was beautiful.

AH: Her work is something else. 

SH: She’s great. Yeah. I met her years ago, I think in 2014. Her and the Misma gang, got to hang out with them and Jacq. She’s great, it’s so nice to see her work translated.

AH: I’ve read other interviews where you say that you’re thinking that Bad Gateway is the beginning of a series.

SH: Yeah, Bad Gateway is the first of five books.

AH: What are your expectations, personally, from all of this? Where do you think you’re going to be when you’re done with book five?

SH: I’m going to be a millionaire. *laughs*

AH: Awesome. *laughs*

SH: It’s the American dream. A foreigner living the American dream. You can really make it in this shithole! *Alex & Simon laugh*

To be serious, I want to be satisfied with the work most of all. I want to do work I’m happy with. I’ve done a TV option thing, turned a lot of networks down, and I’m trying to be really careful. But I’m working with some people on the TV side, and it’s the closest I’ve ever gotten [to having a Megg & Mogg show]. I’ve actually signed something and I’m allowing shit to happen.  I’m tough with that shit. But if that happens, I’m hoping that would do well. Or it could go down in flames, whatever. I’m not throwing my hat in the ring completely. If a TV show happens, I’m not going to be there every day, I’m going to trust someone else to do it. 

I’m a cartoonist, I live that. I want to stay at home with my wife and my pets and do my work. That is what fulfills me, that’s my niche, that’s everything to me. I just want the books to be good. I don’t know, I want to cement my place or whatever. Continue my “lavish lifestyle” and take care of my family. I want to buy my mother a house before she fucking dies, and make her happy and proud. 

As for the comics, I’ve got everything all planned out in my mind, and I have copious notes. The next book I’m really excited to start. I’m breaking it all apart and then I’m going to put it all back together again. It’s going to be different. I’m going to process a bunch of shit, talk about a bunch of shit. I’m enjoying these characters.

AH: And you’ve got a comic in an issue of Playboy coming out?

SH: Yeah, that issue is out now, I did a Little Annie Fanny-style sort of quest for pleasure. I’m not sure if they’ve had a trans model in Playboy yet, but I’ve gotten Booger in there, and Megg with her hairy legs. It’s pretty forward thinking. 

AH: Well, for Playboy.

SH: I don’t know, Playboy seems kind of cool now. They’ve rebranded, it’s a deluxe quarterly, all shiny and no ads. And they’ve let me do this sort of gross, kind of sexy comic. So that’s something.

AH: Hmmm.

SH: But ultimately forging ahead, trying to clear my plate of this freelance stuff so I can just hunker down and write this book. I just want to get cracking. And I’m going to put it out as zines.

AH: Okay, that’s different. 

SH: I experimented with doing Bad Gateway in one go, just hiding away, not traveling, doing it as one book, and I didn’t like that. Tying it back into the Netflix thing, I want to have the dopamine hit for the fans.

AH: Right. 

SH: Every two months, like 30 pages, just the black and white skeleton stuff before I color, but you get all the chapters and there are gonna be bonus strips. I want to pay young cartoonists $300 bucks a page for backup features, like the old Peter Bagge Hate mags. So you know, feature young artists I like, and get them in the back. Try to get readers to go see their work and go buy their book on Etsy. Put in a letters page. 

AH: Yeah? 

SH: I want it to be fun. Pump those zines out every two months, and that will pay my rent and my immigration bills. And pay for my rabbits’ medicine, because my rabbits are very sick and need a lot of medicine. Buy my mom some groceries  and buy myself some new shoes. 

AH: There you go.

SH: I gotta treat myself! 

AH: But you’re right, there is something to be said about the dopamine hit of having something out constantly. 

SH: Right! Whenever a musician you like puts out a new album, it’s exciting, whenever a new book comes out, it’s exciting. And if you like something and you’re passionate about it, you don’t want to be waiting forever. But sometimes the wait is amazing. For my next book, Megg’s Coven, I’m going to do a full nine month press cycle. Not just three months before it comes out. Hit libraries, do a proper thing. I want to experiment with that. I’ve seen recently with some albums that they hype them up for a longer time than usual and then when they come out it’s at the height of excitement. You’re counting down, you really want to hear the album, you’re excited when it finally comes. 

But on the other hand, it’s over in an hour and then you just want that next hit. 

AH: Yeah, that’s a good point. 

SH: To an extent I miss the floppies of yore. I grew up in the 90s, pre-internet, VHS, cassettes, you know, voraciously looking for content and learned to find it in comic books. I miss that. Bring it back! 

I’m always telling young cartoonists to just go this BigCartel route, and a lot of people are, I’m not the first to do it. It’s a great way to interact with fans and directly deal with people and cut out the middleman. I still have to pay the BigCartel fee or whatever, and pay to mail it to them. But generally you’re bypassing everything. Get yourself a BigCartel and a stamps.com account. My wife and I run it together. And it’s a little mom and pop kind of business. It feels honest.

AH: And this is a way to stay connected with the larger world without having to put everything you’re doing on the internet.

SH: Yeah. It’s just a nice little industry. It feels like the barter system in a way. Like making this thing is what I have to contribute to society. I’m a jester, and I have these little comedic booklets that might make you feel something. And if you enjoy them, you can buy them. And I can I buy other people’s books and other people’s artisanal crafts and we’re all kind of supporting each other and building new fans. And for some reason, people that don’t make comics come into comics. There used to be a sense that at comic shows, it was all just cartoonists buying each other’s books-

AH: Just the same $20 moving around-

SH: *laughs* yeah, that same $20 just fluttering around the room. You could mark the bill and find it again later in the day. But people like Raina Telgemeier are bringing a whole new generation into comics. She’s selling the most books, and bringing all these young women into comics who will make comics, and buy comics, or grow up and maybe buy comics for their kids. And not just Raina’s comics, maybe Julie Doucet! Or, oh, Anna Haifisch, these seem funny. And maybe some old classics, Like Danny Clowes or maybe some Hanselmann, maybe some old man Hanselmann once the kids are a bit older. Or, you know, maybe they’ve had a sibling who went through a horrible drug addiction, and they’ll empathize with the characters and maybe learn how to deal with that kind of behavior. 

AH: Life lessons from Megg and Mogg.

SH: I do think that Megg and Mogg can be instructional, in a way. Like what not to do as a father with Werewolf Jones-

AH: Yeah, like don’t put your baby in a birdcage?

SH: *laughs* Yeah-

AH: *laughs* Yeah, don’t do that.

SH: I did a show at Bellevue recently and I had to explain it to the docents, who are mostly 60s-aged white women. Not all, but most. And here I am with all these fucking mannequins and puppets lying about and Cheeto wrappers and comics on the wall. Comics! So I had to explain it in the context of the opioid crisis. This is how some peoples’ lives look, this is how some people live in depression. And a lot of them had family members that are going through depression, or drugs and stuff. At the start the curator asked, “Do you empathize with these characters? Or are you revolted by this?” and pretty much all of them said that they were revolted. But by the end, we’d all been through this hard, smart journey, and they really did empathize with the characters. The docents were all really nice. They fell in love with the show. They did a really great job talking to the public and breaking it down. It was a journey for all of us.

AH: One of the things that this conversation has brought up is that, while the work of Megg and Mogg is dark, funny but dark, you ultimately seem like an optimist.

SH: Yeah? I guess I do see the glass half full in some ways. I love life-

AH: And even to an extent, you’re tough on yourself because you want yourself to do better.

SH: Yeah, pretty much.

AH: Because you have a vision of what you are capable of.

SH: I just want it to be good and enjoy making it good. And I like competition with people. I like having friendly rivalries and it’s fun to try and impress people, make your friends laugh.

AH:  Yeah.

SH: That’s what it always was growing up. There were no “readers.” Your readers were your friends and contemporaries who were doing the same thing. You tried to make each other laugh and impress each other. I’m still just trying to do that, honestly. All my work has been for me and my friends really, and readers become friends. I’ve met a lot of lovely people on the road. And people have been saying all sorts of things to me at signings recently, like in France people were making me cry, giving me the most personal letters about how my work helped them process the darkness of parents dying, or sexual assault, and how Megg & Mogg was so positive for them.

AH: To some degree that’s nice to hear but also it’s a heavy burden, isn’t it?

SH: I  know it can be off putting for a lot of people and a lot of people like to avoid that kind of stuff.

AH: It’s scary, right?

SH: A lot of people like to revel in the comics and I think they can learn from them. But I keep coming back to these beautiful compliments from people. It’s hard to reckon with that, with all this self-hatred. I used to just be self-deprecating, telling people that all of it stinks. And I’ve still been doing that this week. “It’s terrible, look at all the mistakes in there!” But I’m trying to be more open to the voices of others, to recognize them and tell them that what they say means a lot. To tell them thank you. I know what that was like. When I was young I idolized a musician. And I wrote to them and it meant so much to me. But it’s so hard as an insecure human to recognize someone thinking that you’re cool, or that you make something that matters. It’s hard to hear someone say that meeting you made their day. I hear people say that, and I still want to say, “Really? I’m inside my mind. I look in the mirror at me every day. I hate myself.”

AH: I understand that really intimately, that feeling of self-hate, of poor self-image. But in another way, you can see yourself through these comments and letters. They let you see something of yourself that you otherwise wouldn’t see. 

When I read Megg and Mogg I see parts of myself that I don’t see anywhere else. And I can understand why people react in the way that they do, because it’s visceral, and when things go bad, it’s like “Oh my God.” 

SH: But to me, a lot of this is normal.

AH: Really?

SH: Yeah, I said to my wife, “Look, this is normal!” and she said, “No, it’s not normal. It’s really sad!” And she had it tough as well growing up, but a lot of people have it worse, and this is sadly normal for a lot of people. Ultimately I consider myself lucky. I grew up in the Western world and in Tasmania. I had good welfare in Australia. I have been lucky enough to ply my craft. I’m a fucking cartoonist flying around the world, I’m the luckiest motherfucker! I’m a king. On the scale of how badly things could be, I’m doing so well.

AH: It’s pretty remarkable isn’t it? That comics has brought you here?

SH: I count my blessings every day. I do work hard for it. But I fear it could crumble anytime. That I’ll say something, or get in trouble. Or that my work will start to suck, or that people will change and not want to read it anymore. Because that happens, I’ve seen it happen to other artists.

AH: Hmmm.

I I feel like a lifer at this point. I’ve been self publishing zines since I was eight years old in 1989. And I’m really unhealthy workaholic. So I really don’t think I’m going anywhere. If people want to read it, they can, and hopefully I can maintain at least a few fans and get by. Or get a real job I guess. I don’t have any computer skills, I dropped out of high school, and I’ve got a history of anxiety, depression, and self-inflicted abuse. I’ve maintained jobs in the past, but I’m not good at them. I’m selfish in a way. I just want to draw these comics. In this society, in this time, I think it is a little selfish that I’ve chosen to draw comic books. It’s not the most noble virtuous thing. I’m not really contributing to society-

AH: Well-

SH: I’m a jester, I’m an entertainer-

AH: I’m going to push back against that, pretty heavily. What does the world look like if you aren’t there to make people laugh? Or to bring context to the darkness of peoples’ experiences and lives? That’s very valuable to a lot of your readers.

SH: I guess when I think about my personal relationship with art, yes it is very valuable to me. So yes, I’m contributing to that, I guess. I love art, art has saved my life and given me something to believe in. And it’s given me an outlet, and to most artists I know. I’m always turning to my mother and saying that she needs an outlet, whether it be ceramics or painting or anything really. But it’s hard for some people start late and people try something once and give up. My mother wanted to be a singer and a poet, but she gave it up and feels like it’s too late to start. It’s so therapeutic. I wish she would just stop sitting in the darkness taking drugs and really do something. 

AH: Yeah. Yeah, I hear that. 

SH: Yeah, you need to find your little niche.

AH: You need to find that thing let lets you bring your humanity out. 

SH: And even if it does seem pointless against the void of time, who cares? It will make you happy now.

AH: And that’s enough. That’s good enough.

SH: Yeah, it is. 

Thanks to Simon for sitting down to talk with me, and to Jacq Cohen, who set up the interview and provided image and other support for this interview. And again, please check out Fieldmouse Press and our fundraising page. Thanks!

Interview: Simon Hanselmann – “My greatest wish is that I could freeze time.” was originally published on Sequential State

SPX Panel: Blurring The Visual Lines in Fantasy Fiction

Hello dear reader! It’s been a bit of quiet time at Sequential State as I work on Fieldmouse Press, the brand new nonprofit publisher I launched with Rob Clough, Dan Elkin, and Ryan Carey, at the beginning of the month. During all the hubbub, I also planned and moderated two panels at SPX. Here’s the first – Blurring The Visual Lines in Fantasy Fiction.

To be frank, I was a little nervous at the beginning of the panel, and you can definitely tell. It’s not often that you get to talk with such talented cartoonists. It was also a packed house, not a spare seat in the room. Despite my nerves, it was a great panel with lots of insightful comments from the cartoonists. I had a great time moderating. Thanks especially to Meagan LeBlanc for translating for Anne and Yann – you made the panel possible.

The video is about 45 minutes long, and is embedded below – have a watch! New reviews and other content will be coming next week.

Sequential State is made possible in part by user subscriptions; you subscribe to the site on Patreon for as little as a dollar a month, and in return, you get additional content; it’s that simple. Your support helps pay cartoonists for illustration work, and helps keep Sequential State independent and ad-free. And if you’re not into monthly subscriptions, you can also now donate to the site on Ko-Fi.com. Thanks!

SPX Panel: Blurring The Visual Lines in Fantasy Fiction was originally published on Sequential State

PRESS RELEASE: Small Press Comics Critics Announce Formation Of Nonprofit Publishing House Fieldmouse Press

Fieldmouse Press Board of Directors Field Mouse Press info@fieldmouse.press

For Immediate Release 9/3/2019

Small Press Comics Critics Announce Formation Of Nonprofit Publishing House Fieldmouse Press

Grass Valley, CA: Today, veteran comics critics Daniel Elkin, Alex Hoffman, Rob Clough, and Ryan Carey announced the formation of a new, non-profit publishing company, Fieldmouse Press (www.fieldmouse.press), establishing a visionary, ambitious, and dedicated multi-venue publishing initiative within the burgeoning small press comics community. The company’s first publishing project, SOLRAD (www.solrad.co), will publish comics criticism, essays, interviews, and new comics as a part of a larger effort to serve the public good. SOLRAD will launch at the beginning of January 2020.

Fieldmouse Press will be operated by President Daniel Elkin, long-time publisher and editor at Your Chicken Enemy, with Alex Hoffman, publisher of Sequential State serving as Secretary/Treasurer. Rob Clough of High-Low Comics and Ryan Carey of Four Color Apocalypse round out the company’s initial board of directors. The aim of Fieldmouse Press is to emphasize its four pillars of “comics, critique, community, and collaboration” by presenting challenging, unique, and diverse material to as wide an audience as possible.

Of the press’ founding, Secretary/Treasurer Alex Hoffman said, “Our goal is to provide a space for readers, artists, and the general public to explore the comic arts in the many forms they come in. As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, our goal is to serve this community that we love and do something we think hasn’t been possible before now. And as a nonprofit organization, we can take chances that other publishers haven’t.”

Fieldmouse’s first major publishing project will be a new website, SOLRAD (www.solrad.co), which will be a comics journalism hub featuring all-new and original content ranging from comics criticism, original comics, essays, interviews, and the promotion of small-press events and releases. Further publishing projects will be announced in due course, and will likewise share in the company’s expansive, inclusive, and innovative vision.

 Interested parties are encouraged to contact any of Fieldmouse’s founders with questions, comments, and any business-related correspondence at:

Daniel Elkin: elkin@fieldmouse.press Rob Clough: clough@fieldmouse.press Alex Hoffman: hoffman@fieldmouse.press Ryan Carey: carey@fieldmouse.press

PRESS RELEASE: Small Press Comics Critics Announce Formation Of Nonprofit Publishing House Fieldmouse Press was originally published on Sequential State

Review: Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me, Written by Mariko Tamaki and illustrated by Rosemary Valero O’Connell

Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me is about Frederica Riley and her dream girl, Laura Dean. Freddy is a sweet and good-hearted girl caught in a pickle; while Laura Dean is charming, confident, attractive, and in charge, she’s also constantly breaking up with Freddy. Laura’s not a good girlfriend, and she flits and flirts her way into and out of Freddy’s life. After another major breakup which happens at the beginning of the book, Freddy’s best friend Doodle introduces her to a soothsayer, who gives Freddy some unwanted advice – you need to break up with Laura Dean. Meanwhile, Freddy also writes a series of letters to an online advice columnist, asking for help, all-the-while missing the larger concern that her friends have for her. She’s in capital L Love with Laura Dean, and in the service of that Love, things end up being sacrificed.

Let’s start with the most obvious thing; Rosemary Valero-O’Connell’s illustration in Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me is nothing short of breathtaking. The book uses black and white with a spot pastel pink, and Valero-O’Connell has a cartoony, manga-influenced style that feels right at home with cartoonists like Kevin Czap and Carolyn Nowak. Speaking of spot colors, Rosemary uses that spot pink to great effect, and Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me is full of instances where the color amplifies the emotion of a scene or highlights pacing and formalist changes. This is a stunningly illustrated book, a trumpet blast of a work, fully announcing that Valero-O’Connell has come to chew gum and kick ass. Her control of pacing, her inventive paneling, and her subtle formalist experimentation elevates a relatively conventional love and breakup story into a higher realm. I’ve been watching Valero-O’Connell grow as a cartoonist over the last five years, and while I’ve always been impressed with her cartooning, this book takes things to a new level. Underestimating her talent is a grave mistake.

Tamaki’s writing is less exciting than Valero-O’Connell’s superb cartooning, but fits the needs of the book well. Tamaki has always had a knack for dialogue that has verisimilitude, and she breathes life into this cast of characters. The plot itself is actually fairly standard, but will feel familiar to anyone who went through American high school. The illicit activity at school dances and in bathroom stalls, the smuggled alcohol, and the detritus of schoolwork all set the scene well for this high school love story. And while the plot of Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me isn’t anything new or inventive, it is very honestly and openly queer, which feels like something that wouldn’t have been possible even 10 years ago.

Even if the plotting isn’t a slam dunk, Tamaki tackles some themes that will resonate with many of her target readers. Freddy and Laura Dean have a toxic relationship because of Laura’s selfishness, and Freddy has a lack of self-worth that is potently resonant with my high school experience. Tamaki also speaks to the need for love to be reciprocal, and that love has many forms, and ignoring one for the other can have drastic consequences. Freddy’s relationship with her best friend Doodle has an important role in the story, and the push and pull of that relationship and her relationship with Laura Dean are a clear-eyed example of how things can get clouded and broken, even when they seem like they’re fine.

The combination of likable, believable characters and beautiful illustration in Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me is a potent one, and I find myself still thinking about Valero O’Connell’s illustrations, the push and pull of the cartooning, and ultimately of the work itself. This is a book I think I needed when I was 14. It’s probably a book I needed at 32. Frankly, you’ll be hard pressed to find a better young adult comic published this year. If this is the kind of work you’re interested in, Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me is a must read. 

Sequential State is made possible in part by user subscriptions; you subscribe to the site on Patreon for as little as a dollar a month, and in return, you get additional content; it’s that simple. Your support helps pay cartoonists for illustration work, and helps keep Sequential State independent and ad-free. And if you’re not into monthly subscriptions, you can also now donate to the site on Ko-Fi.com. Thanks!

Review: Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me, Written by Mariko Tamaki and illustrated by Rosemary Valero O’Connell was originally published on Sequential State

Enemies of the State #005 – The Breakaways by Cathy G. Johnson

Episode #5 of Enemies of the State is an interview between critic Alex Hoffman and cartoonist Cathy G. Johnson about her comic The Breakaways, a 2019 middle grade graphic novel from First Second. The Breakaways is Johnson’s first middle grade book. She has previously published work with Koyama Press, and One Percent Press. The Breakaways is focused around a ragtag team of middle school soccer players, The Bloodhounds, and Faith, a quiet, sensitive girl trying to make friends. The book follows the group on and off the soccer field through the ups and downs of friendship during a tumultuous age.

The cast for this episode includes the following critics:

Subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Google Podcasts, and other podcast apps or listen here and at Sound Cloud. If you are a comics critic and are interested in joining in on the show, please contact me using my contact form or through the email on my contact page. And of course, if you have any feedback, contact us!

We hope you enjoy the podcast!

Sequential State is made possible in part by user subscriptions; you subscribe to the site on Patreon for as little as a dollar a month, and in return, you get additional content; it’s that simple. Your support helps pay cartoonists for illustration work, and helps keep Sequential State independent and ad-free. And if you’re not into monthly subscriptions, you can also now donate to the site on Ko-Fi.com. Thanks!

Enemies of the State #005 – The Breakaways by Cathy G. Johnson was originally published on Sequential State

Review: Trans Girls Hit the Town by Emma Jayne

Jayne sets up the evening innocuously enough; Winnie and Cleo get dressed up and then meet on public transit to go out for dinner a local dinner, then have some drinks at a local arcade bar. Along the way, they are misgendered by the cashier at a restaurant, Cleo is harassed by a drunk chaser at the bar, and things start to go downhill from there. 

One thing that I think makes Trans Girls Hit the Town work so well is the way Jayne sets up the reader’s initial perceptions of her characters. Winnie, a woman who transitioned before Cleo, appears to be the more confident of the pair, while Cleo clearly has a lot of fear and anxiety about being in public as a trans woman. Jayne uses these perceptions and twists them a little in the third act of the book, and makes the emotional progress of the story hook you. And Trans Girls Hit the Town emphasizes how different each transition experience is, and how that sometimes those differences can cause conflict between people who would otherwise be united.

There’s a warmth to Trans Girls Hit the Town, and a gentle humor that levies what could be a pretty dark comic. Winnie and Cleo get dinner at Bratty Bottoms and play an arcade game called Naughty Dan’s Smelly Hand, and little notes in the narration are enough for a few wry laughs. 

Jayne’s illustration is cute and engaging, and fits the material well. I think specifically Jayne shows an understanding of human body language that other cartoonists miss. Cleo’s anxiety is easy to read, and the engaging nature of the work makes her a person you want to root for. Cleo’s struggles in public are therefore all the more harrowing, because you’re on her side and you want her to have a good time. 

Where the comic shines most is with Jayne’s writing. Both characters are believable, and there’s a natural cadance to their dialogue that feels exactly right. I’m reminded of Hartley Lin’s dialogue in Young Frances, which I felt was particularly excellent. 

I think there’s a lot of value in the way that Trans Girls Hit the Town bears witness, and makes readers see things they would rather not. I imagine that many trans women have had nights like this, and have had experiences worse than this in public. But that said, it’s clear that Trans Girls Hit the Town is not written for readers like me; I get a sense that Jayne’s work is generally made for other trans people, and Trans Girls Hit the Town is dedicated to trans women. In this sense, the theme of solidarity that weaves itself throughout the comic and crystallizes in the third act is the driving force of Trans Girls Hit the Town. “We can get through this together,” Jayne says. Not only is that something worth saying; Jayne says it particularly well.

Sequential State is made possible in part by user subscriptions; you subscribe to the site on Patreon for as little as a dollar a month, and in return, you get additional content; it’s that simple. Your support helps pay cartoonists for illustration work, and helps keep Sequential State independent and ad-free. And if you’re not into monthly subscriptions, you can also now donate to the site on Ko-Fi.com. Thanks!

Review: Trans Girls Hit the Town by Emma Jayne was originally published on Sequential State

Review: Pope Hats #6: Shapeshifter by Hartley Lin

AdHouse Books has been publishing Pope Hats for nearly a decade. The series has been critically lauded, and a new issue is often the cause for celebration. The last few years have been revelatory for the series and its creator. With the publication of Young Frances (a collection of issues #1-3 and #5 of Pope Hats), Canadian cartoonist Hartley Lin dropped his long-held pseudonym, Ethan Rilly. Less than a year and a half later, Lin has released the sixth issue of the series. Pope Hats #6: Shapeshifter is 32 pages of black and white comics, and is a clear contrast to previous issues. The cover is immediate proof of this change; Lin himself appears alongside a massive baby and ladybug. This contrast is a signal that, at least for this issue, everything has changed.

Pope Hats #6: Shapeshifter is therefore aptly named; it is Harley Lin discarding a pseudonym and revealing himself to the world, but it is also a waymarker by which to separate different phases of his life. Lin himself is shapeshifting, becoming something new from something old. The catalyst at the heart of this issue becomes visible relatively quickly – Lin is a new father, and the work presented in Pope Hats #6 is a reflection of that. Lin is processing the new experiences of fatherhood, with all of its worries and exhaustion. And, in doing so, Lin is becoming more open with his writing than he ever has, bringing more to the reader than ever.

Being the parent to a newborn is a uniquely challenging experience. There’s nothing like it that I’ve ever experienced, and it can take even the most easy going person and wring them like a sponge. There’s a strange neurosis and a crawling anxiety that accompanies almost every action you take. The numbness of sleep deprivation claws at your sanity. Any moment that isn’t consumed by this mental twilight is one to hold on to tightly, because not many memories escape the haze. 

Unlike previous work, Lin uses a 2×2 grid throughout Pope Hats #6, perhaps more out of necessity than anything else. The structure of the comics in Pope Hats #6 seem like an admission, a “this is the work that could get done.” The moments he illustrates, like trying to soothe his fussy son using every trick he knows (and failing), will feel immediately familiar and tender to anyone with children. Those who have never had the privilege of childrearing will likely come away from this specific piece empty.

And perhaps it is because of this fragile, tenuous personal situation that Lin’s comics have become more poetic and more lyrical than before.  A series of interspersed one-pagers titled “Driving Through Vermont” are comics poetry at its best, beautiful and enduring. “Forget It,” a meditation on parenthood, touches on much of the concerns of this piece, but in a personal, specific way. Lin’s piece about his wife’s hair loss during pregnancy was likewise touching, a meditation on fear and love and the unknowns of life. And Lin’s cartooning is as precise and as gorgeous as ever, a testament to his skill and exacting eye. The book is a joy to look at. 

For the record, I realize that I am primed for this reading experience. Much of Pope Hats #6 addresses something that still feels fresh for me, and I get that while it’s a common experience, it isn’t universal. I’ve been through a lot of the things that Lin is expressing here. I understand, to a large extent, why these comics feel powerful to me. And I can see a person who thinks these comics don’t feel like anything. But, like they say, if you know, you know. 

Autobio comics aren’t exactly what we’ve come to expect from Hartley Lin, but he shows an adeptness for the form. His previous short stories from Pope Hats #4 come to mind, since one of Lin’s strengths is knowing the precise amount of detail it requires to convey a particular moment or human emotion without strangling it to death. These comics are a further distillation of that tendency.

What Hartley Lin brings to the table having shapeshifted into a new kind of person is worth considering. What does the future of Pope Hats look like now that Lin has a family? It’s not clear whether Pope Hats #6 is a new era or a moment of respite between decade-long sagas. I for one am excited to read more of Lin’s fiction. But frankly, it doesn’t matter what kind of comics Lin makes over the next few years. What matters is what is in front of us now, and Lin’s latest work is a revelation. Pope Hats #6 is everything I could ask for, a book that brings Lin’s beautiful cartooning into a place void of the detachment I’ve felt in his previous work. It marries the personal with a quietude that’s profound and far-reaching. And, while the work in Pope Hats #6 is clearly inward-focused, it is more honest and more assured than ever.

Sequential State is made possible in part by user subscriptions; you subscribe to the site on Patreon for as little as a dollar a month, and in return, you get additional content; it’s that simple. Your support helps pay cartoonists for illustration work, and helps keep Sequential State independent and ad-free. And if you’re not into monthly subscriptions, you can also now donate to the site on Ko-Fi.com. Thanks!

Review: Pope Hats #6: Shapeshifter by Hartley Lin was originally published on Sequential State

Review: A Fire Story by Brian Fies

Fies has since expanded that original 19 page webcomic to a whopping 154 pages, and published the book with Abrams Comics Arts this March. The expanded book colors and touches up Fies’ original comic, and includes some of the information surrounding the incident, his wife and children’s reaction to the loss of their family home, and anecdotal stories from other fire survivors.

I’m in a strange position with A Fire Story. I know what it’s like to have your world turned upside down by a large-scale fire. I’m also not that familiar with Fies or his work. I’ve seen copies of Mom’s Cancer in the local used bookstore, but never picked them up, so the 19-page webcomic was my first true introduction to Fies’ work back in 2017. Fies has a workman-like style, minimalist in a Family Circus kind of way. There’s nothing in A Fire Story that really strikes me as visually impressive, other than the sheer capriciousness nature of fire and Fies’ occasionally impressive use of color. The book is relatively unassuming to look at, and visually monotonous. A Fire Story is more about transmitting Fies’ experience than anything else, and uses comics to transmit information in the way that words can’t.

One of the things I noticed about the original 19 page comic was how snappy it was. Those off-the-cuff drawings have a vivid, living quality, and I felt my own experience in those pages. I am sure that’s why the comic got so much national attention. Unfortunately, the expanded version of the book maintains none of those initial qualities of the webcomic. I found A Fire Story to be something of a stodgy read. The book bounces around chronologically and uses stories from other fire survivors to break up the book. The breaks are necessary, only to keep the personal anecdotes of A Fire Story from becoming too monotonous.

It’s clear that Fies is using A Fire Story to process the trauma of the house fire; he says as much in the afterword of the book. One specific scene shows Fies trying to remember if he owns a watch, a phenomenon he has called “ash brain” in interviews. It’s clear that the trauma is still real, and the scope of the tragedy of the Tubbs fire is almost immeasurable. But A Fire Story feels like that Fies hasn’t finished his processing of the events of that morning in October. Having expanded the work, Fies has attempted to build in more information and nuance. But A Fire Story is dull and unmemorable. And maybe this is an editing problem; it’s hard to decipher what this book would need to be more successful. Readers looking for the crystallized core of A Fire Story should just stick to the webcomic. The full book feels scattered, unable to hold the weight of Fies’ trauma.

Sequential State is made possible in part by user subscriptions; you subscribe to the site on Patreon for as little as a dollar a month, and in return, you get additional content; it’s that simple. Your support helps pay cartoonists for illustration work, and helps keep Sequential State independent and ad-free. And if you’re not into monthly subscriptions, you can also now donate to the site on Ko-Fi.com. Thanks!

Review: A Fire Story by Brian Fies was originally published on Sequential State

Kickstarter Feature: The Seas

Readers interested in the anthology can back the Kickstarter here.

Kickstarter Feature: The Seas was originally published on Sequential State

Review: Off Season, by James Sturm

Off Season is about Mark, a working class handyman and home builder who has recently separated from his wife Lisa. Lisa’s embroiled in the 2016 election as a volunteer for Hilary Clinton. Mark is subcontracting for a shady guy who won’t pay him and keeps delaying the work for a major client. The story of Off Season is one of upheaval; Mark deals with shifts in the reality politic, his relationship with his estranged wife, the health of his elderly parents, and his work. The main character’s profession seems a little odd, but it’s biographical, in a side-long kind of way: as Sturm was beginning the process of writing Off Season, he was getting bilked by a contractor doing work on his own home.

Off Season also acts as an artifact of an artists creating something in a specific time and place. Off Season was serializing on Slate at the same time that the 2016 election was happening. In effect, the second half of the book was created in response to the political crisis that election represented. Sturm uses Off Season as a way to process both his feelings about his business relationship with a contractor and the shock and horror of the post-election aftermath, the feeling that things had enormously and irreparably gone off the rails.

Sturm uses a simple 1×2 grid on each page, constructed so that Mark’s monologue runs in tandem with the events appearing on page. Much of the time, this is used to give Mark’s perception of the events that are happening in real time. These monologues reveal Mark’s mental state and his anger, which flares throughout the book. Sturm makes the odd choice to make all of his characters anthropomorphic dogs. Initially I was of the opinion that the book would have been better with human faces; on first read, it doesn’t seem like the anthropomorphism is necessary. However, on subsequent readings, I found that the dog faces add a level of opacity to the characters, and in general puts distance between them and the reader. The effect is an essential part of the work, and part of the reason that Off Season manages to stay afloat throughout a turbulent second act.

If you could use a word to explain the overall tone of Off Season, melancholic would be where I would start. The melancholy of the writing and the nostalgia is complemented by Sturm’s use of ink washes throughout the book. Sturm is an accomplished cartoonist, and just like his previous work, I found the pages of Off Season pleasantly illustrated and well composed.

As time wears on and I get a little more perspective about James Sturm’s work, I’ve realized that Sturm isn’t necessarily interested in his characters, but rather in the themes his work examines. Market Day, for instance, was about a Jewish rugmaker, yes, but it was actually a rumination on depression and anxiety as an artist. The story of Market Day is composed to extract the most value as possible from the thematic elements of the comic, not necessarily to be a satisfying or interesting narrative. You can say the same about his latest book. Off Season is about Mark and Lisa, their kids, the political realities of 2016, and all of that. But more importantly, it’s about betrayal.

Betrayal is everywhere in Off Season, and it’s not hard to see it if given the appropriate lens. At the core of the book is Mark’s relationship with his wife Lisa. He feels betrayed by her leaving him. His brother has moved away from home, leaving Mark to handle his elderly parents’ affairs. Mark’s boss, Mick, writes him bad checks and leaves him hanging out to dry. If you read it all one way, it seems like it’s Mark vs. The World. But the truth is more complicated – Mark is just as implicated as Lisa in the floundering of his marriage. He makes promises to his boss that he doesn’t keep. Betrayal rears its head with Mark’s petty behavior towards the people he loves, including his parents. He damages a client’s property when he doesn’t get paid. Mark does his fair share of betraying, and he’s not a saint or a good person, even – reading him as a benevolent every man whose had his world dumped onto him is a grievous error. The political undercurrent is also relevant; Mark was a big Bernie Sanders supporter, and feels betrayed that the Democrats have selected Clinton as their nominee. And, although the book never fully says so, there’s the unspoken yet probable reality that Mark voted for Donald Trump as a way to get back at his wife. Even the reader is betrayed by Mark and his unreliable narration.

The theme of betrayal is so profoundly presented in every moment of Off Season that it starts to grate on you. It feels as though Sturm, in his effort to say, “It’s a book about this thing! Do you get it yet?” overcooks Off Season. The final scene, presented as a monologue about Lisa’s cheating and her postpartum depression while a cat hacks up a hairball, is the most clear and overwrought example of this tendency. And because of this, I find myself irritated, almost insulted. Sturm fails to deliver a profound reading experience in Off Season because he doesn’t trust his reader, doesn’t have faith that they have a brain rattling around in their head. And while I remain impressed by Sturm’s illustrative choices, the thematic impact of the work, and how it clearly responds to a specific political moment, none of this redeems Off Season. It is an intelligent and fascinating book. But Off Season is also fatally flawed.

Sequential State is made possible in part by user subscriptions; you subscribe to the site on Patreon for as little as a dollar a month, and in return, you get additional content; it’s that simple. Your support helps pay cartoonists for illustration work, and helps keep Sequential State independent and ad-free. And if you’re not into monthly subscriptions, you can also now donate to the site on Ko-Fi.com. Thanks!

Review: Off Season, by James Sturm was originally published on Sequential State

Review: Harukana Receive v. 1-3, by Nyoijizai

Now, I can use my own two eyes to evaluate a comic book cover, and what I saw didn’t necessarily line up with Jason’s assertion. Curious, I picked up the first three volumes from the library, and read them. And, having put myself in a position where I put stock in other critics’ writing, I must be perfectly honest: Jason’s leading assessment is the most disingenuous evaluation of the series that I think could possibly be mustered.

I’ve been sitting on these feelings for a while now, and I’m generally not interested in calling out another critic, but I’m cleaning up my “partial reviews” folder this week, and I did promise the internet that I would write this review… so it’s time to get down to business.

Harukana Receive revolves around Haruka Ozora and her cousin, Kanata. Haruka is tall compared to most Japanese girls, and has trouble finding cute clothes due to her size. She doesn’t fit in with the regular crowd, and so when she arrives to stay with her grandmother in Okinawa, she gets a chance to start fresh. She’s immediately pulled in by an ongoing game of beach volleyball, and sees an opportunity to redefine herself. Curiously, her cousin Kanata is a previous beach volleyball player, and in a naive way, Haruka dives into the sport. Seeking training and companionship from other local players, she finds a community she can call her own, and builds new friendships along the way.

Nyoijizai’s illustration is competent but not that exciting. One of the defining features of the comic is that the characters are supposed to be tall, but the proportions are a little weird; in most scenes, the main characters end up looking like they’ve been recently removed from a taffy puller. Nyoijizai tends to waffle between very simple page composition and more dynamic character popouts. Harukana Receive does make the action of a sand volleyball game move smoothly, and smart panelling keeps the tension up throughout most matches. But as soon as a game is over, the speed regresses to a more quiet, less interesting pace.

As with most sports manga, Harukana Receive gets a little didactic. Through Haruka’s lessons from other players, readers learn the rules of the game, terms used by players, and various strategies. Beach volleyball, played with two players, eschews some of the classic stereotypes of volleyball like the “ace,” and specialized positions like the libero are meaningless on small teams. Harukana Receive helpfully explains that good partnership and communication is key to winning beach volleyball. This helpfulness is complemented by plenty of butt-slapping and other “sportsy” antics.

In terms of storytelling, Harukana Receive is a sort of middle of the road comic. There’s the athletic progression of a lead character that drives the storytelling, plus the built-in conflict of matches against other teams. I’ve long believed that sports manga have the easiest kind of setups available to writers, because the natural tendency of sport is conflict. And it’s clear that while Harukana Receive does that sports stuff efficiently, it’s not particularly inspired. The series does slide in some interpersonal drama in the second and third volumes, giving some backstory on Kanata and her previous beach volleyball partner. This drama makes the comic a little more interesting, but it’s essentially set dressing.

Harukana Receive runs in Manga Time Kirara Forward (まんがタイムきららフォワード), a manga anthology published by Houbunsha for adult men. The intended audience for the comic tells you plenty about what to expect from Harukana Receive, if my review hasn’t clued you in thus far. The series is chock-full of all the traditional culprits of fanservice in manga, all generally under the guise of sets, spikes, serves, and receives. There’s also the need to pick out team swimsuits, Haruka’s ogling of other girls and their cup sizes, canoodling, and other “innocent but suggestive” activity that these comics are known for. All things being equal, this is mostly the point of Harukana Receive. The comic is designed so that readers spend as much time as possible looking at highschool girls in bathing suits. And honestly, I should have known better than to expect Harukana Receive would be anything but this. Fans of volleyball may find something of interest here, but let’s be real; the cover images tell you everything you need to know.

Sequential State is made possible in part by user subscriptions; you subscribe to the site on Patreon for as little as a dollar a month, and in return, you get additional content; it’s that simple. Your support helps pay cartoonists for illustration work, and helps keep Sequential State independent and ad-free. And if you’re not into monthly subscriptions, you can also now donate to the site on Ko-Fi.com. Thanks!

Review: Harukana Receive v. 1-3, by Nyoijizai was originally published on Sequential State

Review: Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe

Let’s start with the lesser of these, which is the second mode – Kobabe, through eir exploration of gender, gives readers a bit of an explainer on specific terms and ideas; for example, the use of the Spivak pronouns (e/em/eir) to indicate that the person in question does not identify with traditional male or female pronouns he/her. Kobabe’s writing is very gentle, and integrates the more didactic parts of the book almost seamlessly into eir personal story. For people who have never reflected on their gender or the Western societal construction of the false male/female binary, Gender Queer opens the door to that conversation.

That conversation is important, but Kobabe’s work in Gender Queer is stronger when there is a clear focus on eir own personal experience with gender. From a young age, Kobabe isn’t sure what to make of emself, uncomfortable with being assigned female at birth, and truly uncomfortable with the concept of gender as a whole. At one point, e excerpts a passage from a childhood diary – “I don’t want to be a girl. I don’t want to be a boy either. I just want to be myself.” That desire to “just be myself” is the driving force of the book.

Kobabe’s art is capable and highly reminiscent of Lucy Knisely’s recent work. The parallel between Kobabe and Knisely is a powerful one; both are autobiographers, although Knisely is a little farther along in her career than Kobabe is in eirs. But Knisely’s early work was highly lauded, commercially successful, and included in college and high school curricula. I expect, if I were to speed up time and look at where Gender Queer is in a few years, I could say the same thing.

One major difference between Kobabe and Knisely, at least based on my reading, is how open Kobabe’s work is. Gender Queer has a lot to unpack, but to be blunt, Kobabe has truly laid a lot of things bare. Kobabe is not hiding in this book, and I feel a stronger sense of “truth” to Gender Queer than I ever did with Age of License or Displacement. That truth is uncomfortable, whether it’s Kobabe struggling with preventative health services at eir OBGYN or trying to explain to eir lesbian aunt that being genderqueer is not an internalized form of misogyny. 

And Kobabe’s story, while at times heartbreaking, is filled with loving people – supportive friends, an accepting family. In some sense, this love and support makes it easier for Kobabe to share eir story. Kobabe doesn’t have to worry about getting thrown out of eir parents house, is able to go to college and get a good education, ends up in an advanced degree program. These are privileges that a lot of genderqueer people don’t have. There’s a lot of best case scenario here, and that’s okay! But there’s only so much you can see when the end of a journey is a mirror. I found Gender Queer to be tender, introspective, positive, and honest, and I expect this text to be formative reading for a lot of people. I found the book compelling, found Kobabe’s writing to be smooth, eir art competent. But I also think that readers who use Gender Queer as their “one genderqueer book” and fail to further explore the stories of trans and genderqueer people do themselves a massive disservice.

Sequential State is made possible in part by user subscriptions; you subscribe to the site on Patreon for as little as a dollar a month, and in return, you get additional content; it’s that simple. Your support helps pay cartoonists for illustration work, and helps keep Sequential State independent and ad-free. And if you’re not into monthly subscriptions, you can also now donate to the site on Ko-Fi.com. Thanks!

Review: Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe was originally published on Sequential State

Review: BTTM FDRS by Ezra Clayton Daniels & Ben Passmore

Horror as a genre has a long history of addressing systemic injustice and BTTM FDRS falls firmly in that vein. Published by Fantagraphics, BTTM FDRS is the latest comic from Ezra Clayton Daniels and Ben Passmore, two rising stars in the small press comics world. The book stars Darla, a young and talented clothing designer looking for a label, who moves into the Boneyards, a fictional economically depressed area of Chicago’s south side. The building she moves into is a giant windowless concrete box, and while the rent is cheap, creepy stuff starts popping up during the move in. Meanwhile, Darla’s upper class white friend Cynthia uses Darla’s move to her advantage, trying to gain credibility and prestige on the back of Cynthia’s “authentic” living experience. But that experience goes haywire, and what starts as creepy turns into a dramatic satirical body horror that digs deep into themes of gentrification, exploitation, racism, and white privilege. 

Both Clayton Daniels and Passmore use their creative work in pointedly political ways, and BTTM FDRS is no different. Deciding to build a horror comic around gentrification is a clear response to the effect of the “phenomenon” on black lives. We see this response throughout the comic. Darla, an artist originally from the Boneyards, moves back because the rent is cheap. She’s one of the only renters in her building, and she’s an invader from outside the community, which is personally isolating and alienating. Her connection with other black residents is tenuous and at times strained. But it’s her developer landlord Gene who encourages artists to move in, to create an “arts culture” that he can build into a financial gain. In the fullest sense, Gene exploits Darla financially and culturally, and his presence throughout the comic is a stark reminder of the oppressive exploitative financial pressure of gentrification on economically disadvantaged communities across the country. 

Another theme of the comic is the way racism works on a spectrum. There’s the more open nastiness, the refusal of 911 to assist Darla in an emergency, and then there’s the oblivious co-opting of Darla’s neighborhood for “street cred” by her white friend Cynthia. When Darla and Cynthia get into an argument about Cynthia being shitty, it leads down a path that is irreversibly bad for everyone involved. Passmore and Clayton Daniels implicate a wide swath of people; the financial complex, the media who prioritize Cynthia over Darla, and on and on.

As a writer, Clayton Daniels has already shown that he can put together a good, twisty suspense comic with his celebrated Upgrade Soul. But, like his other major work, BTTM FDRS takes a little time to get moving. The slow build of BTTM FDRS is like an engine warming up, and some readers may be impatient for the scares. Once the book gets through the first act, the speed and intensity pick up dramatically, making it un-put-down-able.

Every horror story has to have its monster, and in this case, it’s the giant housing complex that Darla lives in. There’s a clear metaphorical linkage between the house and black culture. The monster’s original function was as a fully automated home, and it was created by a black genius. The technology of the home was exploited by white powerbrokers who wanted to use it for their own gain (in prisons, a nod to the carceral state), and turned into something unrecognizable when put into the hands of white people. White characters throughout the comic want to exploit it without being fully integrated into it or a part of it. In a sort of sly nod to cultural power generally, the monster is directable, but it’s also instinctive and not fully controllable. It works in ways you don’t quite understand, and can hurt people quickly and irreversibly. Chucky, a side character whose aunt created the technology and who grew up knowing the internal workings of the house, calls it a “snail without a shell.” It’s clear that who the “shell” is matters a great deal.

Passmore’s art is spectacular throughout, and a highlight of the comic. The book is wider than it is tall, using a 2×2 grid that Passmore modifies to highlight important story beats. There’s not a lot of formal experimentation here, but there doesn’t need to be. His linework is cartoony and dynamic, lending to the humor of the comic. His style is perfect for the kind of biologic yuck factor that turns this book from interesting to inspired. The simplified color scheme uses bright contrasts to amplify the unreality of the work. The opening scene where Darla and Cynthia go into the apartment bathroom only to have the toilet ‘glorp’ at them and spill out a pile of red innards is a fantastic example of the humor of the comic. Cynthia’s posture in this scene puts Darla in front of her like a shield, and Darla’s what-the-fuck facial expression tell you a lot about the tone of the book to come. The character’s faces, the goofiness of the scene, the perfect color choices, it all adds up to something special. It’s funny, it’s creepy, it’s weird, it’s good.

Both Clayton Daniels and Passmore have been on something of a tear recently – Upgrade Soul was a dramatic horror/suspense comic that finally found its collected form in 2018, to much acclaim. Passmore’s own work in Your Black Friend has been nationally recognized. So to see BTTM FDRS come out so closely to those two works is fortunate, because it shows that the two are great collaborators as well as individual creators. BTTM FDRS takes elements of their shared work and combines it into something that’s special. With its biting social commentary and fascinating worldbuilding, plus Passmore’s vibrant illustration and otherworldly colors, BTTM FDRS is the book of the summer. An absolute must read.

Fantagraphics provided a review copy for the purposes of this review.

Sequential State is made possible in part by user subscriptions; you subscribe to the site on Patreon for as little as a dollar a month, and in return, you get additional content; it’s that simple. Your support helps pay cartoonists for illustration work, and helps keep Sequential State independent and ad-free. And if you’re not into monthly subscriptions, you can also now donate to the site on Ko-Fi.com. Thanks!

Review: BTTM FDRS by Ezra Clayton Daniels & Ben Passmore was originally published on Sequential State