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Special Feature
Geek Fest A sporadic series on the Best-in-Show books at the Northeast?s leading indie-comics communion, the MoCCA Arts Festival By Adam McGovern
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The young don’t explode hypocrisies as cleverly as they think they do, but adults seldom revisit or recollect their own past with honesty or perspective useful for those going through the same things. Miss Lasko-Gross looks back with relentless truthfulness on an adolescence of obsessive self-criticism and righteous indignation in the second volume of her semi-autobiography, A Mess of Everything.
From A Mess of Everything by Miss Lasko-GrossWithout the sitcom cutesiness or issue-of-the-week melodrama that masks so much realistic youthful experience in mass entertainment, Lasko-Gross harvests hilarious neurotic conflict and acute psychological pathos from her misfit younger self and a cast of well-meaning, imperfectly-understanding, partially-functional friends and family.
Lasko-Gross has a keen eye for the significant episode and the comedic real-life fixation or faux pas, editing out no damning detail or painful moment while shaping her story and focusing her perspectives with a skill and succinctness missing in many an indie diarist. Lasko-Gross’ stand-in, the adolescent Melissa, rails against propagandistic high-school curricula, sulks around a Clinton-era landscape of sectarian cliques and rapidly cloning retail chains, toys with sex, shoplifting, punk and zines, and wonders what moves to make about her own minor drug abuse and a friend’s dangerous eating disorder.
Lasko-Gross portrays this in a luminously deglamorized terrain of prefab locales populated by likable, lumpen characters, with a washed-out palette that suggests a permanently hanging thunderstorm and the unsparing spotlight of unfiltered memory. Concertedly drab suburban set-pieces are prefaced by ingeniously surreal opening panels, at times resembling some kind of dismantled stained-glass window design, which Lasko-Gross then invokes often in strange radiating patterns around confused kids’ heads that look like slowly shattering halos.
As the book moves on, Melissa reaches some self-strengthening conclusions without platitudes, and Miss Lasko-Gross draws to a deeply touching finale without clichés. You won’t read a better life story this year – that’s the truth, and so is this book. [www.misslaskogross.com; www.fantagraphics.com]
From Nine Ways to
Disappearby Lilli
CarréNo comics creator since Steve Ditko has had as direct access to their subconscious as Lilli Carré, and perhaps none ever (not Ben Katchor, not Jim Woodring) has been better at navigating its meanings and following its logic on its own terms. Nine Ways to Disappear is an enthralling book of strange vignettes from people’s inner lives, one panel per small page in homespun antique-pattern picture frames. Carré is a chronicler of the unnoticed, and as per the title these are nine portraits of people and events that drift out of sight.
It opens with “Dorado Park” (reviewed here last year), in which two sisters literally grow apart as one of them finds a mate and causes a surreal wilderness to fill up their house and crowd the other sister out. In “Sleepwalker” a passive man who can only be acted upon has no frame of reference for his transient relationships and chronic rootlessness, symbolized with bizarre sleepwalking episodes and a float across the ocean that brings him to a T.S. Eliot moment of full-circle homecoming, without the revelation.
In “The Neighbor” a little girl visits an ailing elderly fellow apartment tenant who progressively shrinks smaller than she is, signifying the disappearance of past generations over the horizon behind headlong youth. In “What Am I Going to Do?” and “The Sun,” characters literally collapse under the weight of their anxieties, in the best, gruesome cubist slapstick this side of Alixopulos. “Wide Eyes” offers a hallucinatory, grotesque device for showing a guy who serially feels he’s getting lost in another’s love and tries to be invisible to her, in a tragic/farcical alternating current of attraction and isolation that depends on the wideness of his view and what it’s willing to take in.
There are two bittersweet vignettes about the relics of existence that flow down a storm drain, and in Carré’s latest masterpiece, “The Pearl,” a precious artifact passes through many weird adventures and unknowing hands in an absurd drama about the unseen ghosts of past experience hovering around the ephemera that moves across our lives and means things we don’t much try to notice.
Carré’s boneless, Demoiselles d’Avignon-faced characters express a remarkable, expanding range of both vaudeville exaggeration and genuine emotional layers, and there’s a new palette of settings and textures, from Freudianly dingy clubs in “Wide Eyes” to, in “The Pearl,” a few worlds-full of fantastic silent-movie locales and trance-vision human transformations. Nine Ways to Disappear shows an important, endearing talent making an unerasable mark. [www.lillicarre.com; www.littleotsu.com]
From
Geraniums and
Bacon#5 by Cathy LeamyCathy Leamy’s minicomics catalogue the humble art of self-consciousness. In Geraniums and Bacon #5, her alter egos and imaginary friends blend into various crowd scenes with an acute, private sense of their own difference, be it restless late-night coffee runs in insomniac Boston or awkward clothes-shopping expeditions (underwear that embarrasses them, wedding gowns they have no intention of using). The self-deprecating epiphanies and mild comedy of post-revolutionary metropolitan lesbian life fall somewhere between early Alison Bechdel and that other comic-strip Cathy. There are amusing sidetrips into surrealism, and, though I may never share the experience of going to a bridal sale just to observe the sociological stampede, the lament “I’m gonna lose an eye on a hanger and I’m only here ironically!” is the new frontrunner for my tombstone text. Leamy is a gentle humorist to look out for. [comics.metrokitty.com]
Read Part 2 here
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