This and, spoilers, the upcoming WWACommendations contain some of my favorite things: Fall reads, zines, and mini-comics! We’re coming to you post CAKE, SPX, and several other indie fests, and as I write this intro the Short Box Comics Fair is also underway. On top of that, it’s also Fall publishing season in the mainstream publishing world, so lots of exciting new titles for us to explore and then recommend to you. This year has kind of felt like slowly going down a slide and at the bottom, I will just crumple up in fetal position and fall asleep. We’re almost there, and we’ll read a bunch of good comics on the way.
Alenka Figa: I only made it to CAKE (the Chicago Alternative Comics Festival) for about an hour this year, but I still made it and still bought some wonderful comics! Two standouts so far — I haven’t read everything I bought yet — are both part of the Mini Memoir Project, a series of twelve short memoir comics released by Paper Rocket Minicomics. Each issue is a square-shaped and stapled mini with each page containing a single black and white panel. This format keeps the comics moving at a nice pace, but each page has a good, often emotional beat. All the stories are about the artists’ childhoods.
Issue six is the small things by Robyn Smith. Little Robyn loves cricket, but when she sets out to play with her brother and his friends they exclude and ignore her. That’s the gist of the comic, but Smith brilliantly lays out how the boys are utterly oblivious to little Robyn’s experiences. Her facial expressions are blunt and articulate in the way only a child’s can be. She’s unfiltered, and yet the boys fail to see that she’s frustrated with them, because their unwillingness to give her time and space to play puts her in a lose-lose situation. It’s a perfectly paced story that sharply and aptly makes its point.
I also picked up issue eleven, No Thing by Andy Lindquist, which seems to be the latest issue. It’s about teenage Andy’s dysphoria and how they began to understand their trans-ness through Shakespeare. His depiction of dissociation in particular is really striking. It’s very blunt and literal — parts of Andy’s body literally separate on the page — which is perfect for a quick-read format. Lindquist also uses the wordplay of “thing” and “no thing” being Shakespearan slang for penis/vagina as cleverly as the bard himself (or selves, if you’re into that theory) and translates it into a uniquely trans experience. Both of these minicomics are so smoothly crafted and satisfying to read! I highly recommend checking out the whole project.
Emily Lauer: The graphic biography Djuna: The Extraordinary Life of Djuna Barnes, about the extremely weird life of author Djuna Barnes comes out from Street Noise Books on October 8th! Jon Macy, the writer and artist for Djuna, has a personal interest in her life and sometimes interjects captions about his own reactions to the unusual circumstances he’s depicting. Honestly, I found that aspect a little jarring, since it isn’t very consistent, but overall I was captivated by what I learned about Djuna Barnes’s life.
I have read some of Barnes’s short stories and poems, and while she’s not my favorite modernist, the story of her life is incredible. Raised in a dysfunctional “free love” environment that indulged her father’s whims, her family’s demands on her followed her well into her adulthood. The incidents of her life are so wild and varied that they provide a whole history course. Her journalist career, her interactions with famed Dadaists and literary and art salons of Paris, her friendship with Peggy Guggenheim, and her improbable survival into an old age in the East Village neighborhood of New York, all provide a whirlwind tour through the countercultures of the 20th century in Europe and the US.
Reader note for self care: Djuna Barnes’s life was so intense I needed to take frequent breaks when reading Djuna: The Extraordinary Life of Djuna Barnes.
Kathryn Hemmann: I’m starting to get in the mood for autumn, so this month I’d like to recommend Noss & Zakuro, a sweet and gentle Halloween-themed comedy manga for children. Noss is a powerful but shy elder Nosferatu, and Zakuro is her adorable adoptive daughter. The odd pair lives happily together in a cozy little house at the edge of a small town populated entirely by Hollywood movie monsters. When they’re not spending quality time at home watching videos and drinking synthetic blood from juice boxes, Zakuro and Noss are out and about town getting up to minor mischief. Rariatto’s artwork is marvelously expressive and dynamic, and the characters in Noss & Zakuro seem like they would be a lot of fun for kids to draw.
Given that Noss & Zakuro is obviously meant for young children, I couldn’t help but wonder why its North American translation has a “Teen (13+)” rating. If I had to guess, I’d say this might be because the artist has a sizable adult following on social media (like Tumblr) that’s partially due to their mildly lewd (but still very cute) fan art of characters from video games and American cartoons. There’s nothing objectionable in the first volume of Noss & Zakuro, but it’s entirely possible there may be suggestive female character designs in future installments. Regardless, it’s always a pleasure to see an indie fandom artist make it big and publish a book. Good for them!
Kat Overland: I’m currently reading through my haul from SPX, so let’s start with the double sided zine Team Work Makes the Dream Work and Pizza is Surrounded by Crust Like Collaboration is Surrounded by Trust by Beth Hetland & Kyle O’Connell. I nabbed this because it’s shaped like a pizza slice, and to read it you have to unfold it out into various circular pages, almost like a fortune teller made out of paper. Team Work tells the story of Hetland and O’Connell’s creative partnership, and the steps they each must do to complete a comic as artist and writer, respectively. Pizza is shorter (there’s only so many coherent ways to unfold this zine), but describes their close, platonic relationship as both friends and collaborators. Extremely cute and also somewhat of a brain teaser for me, as it took me a bit to figure out how to open it up and read each circular page.
