Arrivals and departures – September 2024

Welcome to the second year of the high-flown “Arrivals and Departures” experience! As I said in the very first column 365 days ago, I’ll continue to cover the comics that are coming into their own and review the comics that bother me or that are bothering me. All in all, I’ll do my best to avoid nostalgia and perfection and aggressive mediocrity, while focusing on comics that have that juice — truthful, good, honest, exciting, inspiring, and alive. Like Clown and the Boys consultation: “The only way is the whole way.” So let’s put on our masks and hit the road.

Cinema time by MD Blue

This comic takes us back to the halcyon days of 2010, one square frame at a time (making it perfect for Instagram restrictions), and into the life of Henry Woodpecker. With his big feet and the face of a vampire bat, Henry fancies himself a film critic, eats pizza with a knife and fork, and seems just one ill-fitting hat away from being a full-fledged “m’lady” man. Cinema time gives us a brief glimpse into Henry’s life, which revolves around going to the theater and talking to someone, anyone, who will listen to him speak his mind. Blue’s reconstructions of movie posters from the era — Real courage, Blue Valentine, Greenberg — bookends these mini-scenes after each conversational and/or situational joke. The format is not unlike that of Daniel Clowes Wills and it really works. (Wilson is so underrated and funny. I think of certain jokes from that book almost every week.)

Seemingly drawn directly in ink on paper, the immediacy contributes to both Blue’s style and the story’s innate humor. Darkness—and since so many scenes are set in a multiplex, it’s an essential part of the comic—is rendered in long, linear scribbles. There’s not much dynamism here, but the magic comes from the tight writing and bizarre character designs. It seems Fraggle Rock Doozers, Emma, ​​and June happen to meet Henry in the lobby and bond over his strange job, perhaps seeing him as an easy target for a short-term sublease or as some sort of romantic comedy co-star. It’s hard to say, because Blue has created a focal point in Henry that prevents the reader from recognizing how much self-awareness he has. I’ve known people like that in my life—and I suspect you have, too—and it’s hard for writers to capture them in fiction without descending into complete parody or meanness. After a date, June invites Henry to stay over, but he chooses to ghost her and go to the theater instead. In this comic, Blue makes you sometimes grudgingly cheer for Henry and sometimes utterly despise him. But for Henry Woodpecker, it doesn’t matter how any of us readers feel, because he’s happy—with his choices, his movies, his life. This comic is quirky and first-rate and gets two thumbs up from me.

The method by Christina Lee

Three short stories are kept here between a cover that looks fittingly like a We weekly. The first, titled “I Can Be Anything (You Want Me to Be)” is about the inner turmoil of a pop sensation, à la Britney Spears and her whole thing. It’s a nine-panel grid printed in blue and pink risograph (what would happen to the indie-comics-industrial complex if there were ever a shortage of riso-pink ink?) until the very end. That’s where Lee compares this singer to Sisyphus and her high heel snaps (she does snap, get it) causing the boulder to crush her. The second story, “Employee of the Month,” is the best in this book. It’s about glassy-eyed corporate drones who work in a skyscraper, send emails, and use jargon. “Employee” outshines the other two in The method not because of the subject matter, but because it’s absolutely the most unhinged. Lee lets loose and has her temps and office administrators jump out of their character models, fart, and be hysterical. I worry that this kind of commentary and satire is being trampled on to death. Meaningless celebrity culture and boring office jobs have been noted countless times in all forms of media — Gen X has kind of made it their thing — but surely we’ve reached the point where there’s no context for those pieces of media anymore.

The final story is about a fictional 40-something stand-up comedian named Brad Harrison. He’s an edgy cancel-culture hack, but also an Oscar nominee and on NPR, somehow? He has a lot of young, passionate female fans that he wants to keep and grow. What’s most intriguing is that there are two pages here where one of the girls gets a non-disclosure agreement and Lee prints out a contract that looks literal. I wouldn’t be surprised if the pages are real. There are fake IDs and gross sexual exploitation of power dynamics and observations about the slippery slope of fandom and that’s the end of The methodWhile reading this comic I kept singing the chorus of an old Art Brut song to myself repeating the phrase, “Popular culture no longer applies to me.” At this point in my life, I find it hard to care about things — celebrities and the people who love them — and this comic, while well drawn and printed, did not change that fact.

Diary of Sophie Margolin

The cover shows the author as a cryptid around a candlestick. Half butterfly, half caterpillar. Those insects—and examples of metamorphosis—are everywhere in this zine of short comics and drawings. On the second page is an illustration of a butterfly with an open cavity for an abdomen. The little caterpillar lies next to it, facing away. It is perhaps the most striking image in Diary for its subtlety, its small size, its multiple meanings. Did the caterpillar roll out of the butterfly’s body because it didn’t feel like it fit? Did the caterpillar try to reach that hole but give up? Is the body itself a winged coffin? Later, there’s a caterpillar stuck in the void of a well, one with antennae and face down in the dirt, a Beanie Baby-like caterpillar drawn next to a bandaged wrist. There’s a torn and defeated butterfly, pieces torn from its three-dimensionally rendered body. And finally, on the back, a butterfly with a dagger through it, bleeding to death. All these caterpillars and butterflies with barely a chrysalis in sight. I can’t help but wonder what Eric Carle would have made of all this.

I focused on the insects earlier because the rest of it is just so brutal. The insects, as tormented as they are, are still more enjoyable to digest than, say, a double page spread with “You’ll be fine” on the left and a torn, decomposing face on the right. Read Diary is like crawling through a gauntlet of vulnerability. Margolin drags the reader’s raw, exposed nerve endings across an electric fence. Or you might want to do it the other way around with the artist and the audience. It’s hard to say. And hard to read. It’s exhausting to get through DiaryBut I must have gone back to the beginning after finishing it half a dozen times in a row, because Margolin is so damn skilled. The smudged pencil drawings of sets of eyes are haunting, and the way she draws her own hair—these are autobiographical sketchbook pages, after all—is utterly distinctive, like tangled, sentient pipe cleaners. This is one of those times when the breadth of her talent is so obvious, but I wish my introduction to Margolin might have begun with another title in her catalog. The trigger warning on the inside front cover is appropriate.

Thank you for taking this journey with me through the first year of “Arrivals and Departures” and here’s to decades. Decades! October is almost here and I’ve already cut out individual pictures from Mr. A comics to hand out to the trick-or-treating kids. See you next month, I hope.

Questions, love letters, and contributions to this column can be sent to @rjcaseywrites on Instagram.