Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart #121: Green Thumbing Your Nose

Comics can be ideal for didactic texts. It’s the reason Understanding Comics is a comic itself.

It’s also why IKEA manuals use their own universal visual language to show how to build. And it’s why manuals and guides as comics can teach more with less space. Along these lines is the new graphic novel from Ophélie Damblé and Cookie Kalkair, Guerilla Green about how to reclaim green spaces in any kind of urban environment.

Part history, part guide, part personal narrative, Damblé and Kalkair have crafted a graphic novel that feels like a graphic textbook for a class on guerrilla gardening. From the beginning, we’re presented with the idea of guerilla gardening in urban spaces—more or less, the reclaiming of disused green spaces in cities to beautify and to provide food for residents. Through Damblé and Kalkair’s view of Paris, we can see the abandoned lots and patches of grass along sidewalks and roads that are ripe for the planting of most anything. And it isn’t simply planting for the sake of planting, the guerilla gardening movement the book espouses looks to help heal urban soil and ensure that the people living in food deserts have access to fresh food across their cities free of charge.

More than anything, Guerilla Green is a story about Damblé’s own journey from simply being a resident of Paris to being actively engaged in making her city a greener, more livable space. Beginning with her own personal efforts with guerilla gardening, she goes onto the history that had inspired her to begin her gardening—from The Digger group in England in the 1650s to Liz Christy in 70s Manhattan to the modern efforts of Ron Finley in LA. She highlights how this isn’t just a singular effort, but rather a community coming together to try to make something from the disused parts of the cities they live in. And outside of a call to gardening arms, Damblé speaks on how the awareness of green spaces in Paris has transformed how she views the city itself as well as greenery in general.

As far as comic guides go, Guerilla Green succeeds with crafting both a manual and an engaging story outlining the whats and whys of guerilla gardening. It is the kind of issue that we may have noticed in our own urban living spaces but didn’t know what to do outside of commenting that someone should do something with that vacant lot. It is absolutely a call to arms, but it’s also a call to education—we can only do so much with a passion, we need to learn how to best approach something new. And this is where Damblé and Kalkair succeed more than anything—with the little knowledge I have from this book, I want to do my own research. And, in the end, that’s what a good guide does.

Get excited. Get green.

Drew Barth at Miami Book Fair in 2019.

Drew Barth (Episode 331) is a writer residing in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida. Right now, he’s worrying about his cat.

Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart #120 by Drew Barth

Have the Time of Your Death

Death is final. Death in comics, a bit less so. Just look at Deadman. Or Swamp Thing. Or the legion of characters that have died and come back to life a dozen times. Their reasons for returning are, at best, nebulous and, at worst, not even explained. But then that’s where a series like The Many Deaths of Laila Starr comes in—not only is death and returning explained, but the cause is literally the Hindu goddess of Death herself. What Ram V, Filipe Andrade, and Inês Amaro have created is a series that straddles the line between life and death in a way that I’ve never seen in comics.

The story here begins with the Goddess of Death being let go from her position in a manner not unfamiliar to anyone who has to empty their desk into a banker box after their employer decides to restructure. But it’s the world itself that is restructuring as Death is losing her job due to a child being born that will soon create a way to give everyone on Earth everlasting life. The one consolation Death is given here is that, instead of simply disappearing, she can inhabit the body of a mortal and live out the rest of her life with a normal mortal lifespan—the body of the titular Laila Starr. And of course she takes this consolation as it is the only real option she has anymore. But she plans on doing something with that life because she wants to keep her job. And the only way to keep her job is with some infanticide.

What works so well in this first issue is the interplay between Ram V’s running narrative and the constant kinetic motion of Andrade and Amaro’s art. Set in Mumbai, even the traffic jams are constantly in motion. The world we’re given for this story does not stand still. And for good reason. Death herself doesn’t have long to deal with the baby that will create immortality and Laila Starr herself is currently falling out of a window to her first death. And the ways in which Ram V’s narration helps to bolster the mood Andrade’s lines create throughout this first issue only helps with that pace. We’re given a moment to linger with characters and dialog before the narration zips us back to speed again.

More than many first issues, The Many Deaths of Laila Starr helps to establish a pace and mood that maintains a perfect consistency throughout. I’m intrigued because the series has a nice combination of mise-en-scéne and traditional comic movement that keeps the story from ever feeling flat. As is good in all first issues, this kind of storytelling helps the world feel alive and lets the characters really shine through with their moods and lives. Or, rather, unlives.

Get excited. Get dead.

Drew Barth at Miami Book Fair in 2019.

Drew Barth (Episode 331) is a writer residing in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida. Right now, he’s worrying about his cat.

Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart #119 by Drew Barth

Oh God, It’s Coming This Way

I’ve said it once before and I will repeat it again and again: John Allison is one of the most consistently great writers in modern comics. I’ve gone over his history in the previous article where I took a look at the first issue of his new series with Max Sarin and Whitney Cogar, Wicked Things. A bit over a year later the six-issue series has ended and the collected edition is out, and is just as good as the first issue had shown. Surprising me, this series, despite being completed, may still live on later.

Wicked Things is a Bad Machinery style mystery all the way through—the main case becomes background for a series of characters and misadventures in-between the bits of serious crime drama. From the inciting assault at the end of the first issue, we’re taken on a journey through the Metropolitan Police, underground casinos, and some brazen heists with our teen detective of the year-slash-murder suspect, Charlotte Grote. Lottie is one of the returning characters from the original Scary-Go-Round stories, and one of the main characters in Bad Machinery, along with another returning friend in the form of Claire Little. Allison has built a sandbox and I’d be remiss if he didn’t play in it more. But his has become a 4-D sandbox with all of his series spinning off and existing in some way together to create a larger universe of stories. Wicked Things is another story that will likely continue due to a cliffhanger so large it may as well star Sylvester Stallone.

As much as I love Allison’s writing in these series, it’s been the art of Max Sarin and the coloring of Whitney Cogar that have made me come back to these series consistently. After stepping in for Lissa Treiman through the second volume of Giant Days, Sarin’s lines have been some of the most expressive and comically perfect I’ve seen in many modern comics. If much of Allison’s work is considered slice-of-life, Sarin and Cogar match that feeling. They’re not going to make life look photo-realistic, but instead opt for the mental pictures we have of ourselves with all of the exaggerated expressions and lunacy that we imagine after growing up watching too many Looney Tunes.

As Wicked Things does end on a cliffhanger, there are more opportunities for the series to continue. But as this single volume stands—along with rest of the work in Giant Days, Scary-Go-Round, and Bad Machinery—it can end here and that would be fine. It’s one of those things that makes Allison that consistent writer—there is a continual feeling of satisfaction with his work once it hits an ending. As a reader, you always want more from characters you’ve been reading for twenty years now, but you’re content with how their stories turned out. But still, I’m exited to see if Wicked Things will continue into the future as I’m never content.

Get excited. Get wicked.

Drew Barth at Miami Book Fair in 2019.

Drew Barth (Episode 331) is a writer residing in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida. Right now, he’s worrying about his cat.

Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart #115 by Drew Barth

How Bad Can It Be?

Long ago, in the pre-plague days, I was asked at my local comic shopif I would like to sign up for releases from a new publisher called Bad Idea. Knowing literally nothing about them, I decided, eh, why not? Well, I completely forgot about signing up due to the pandemic. A full year passed and finally Bad Idea’s first offering—ENIAC by Matt Kindt, Doug Braithwaite, Diego Rodriguez, and Lewis Larosa—is in my hands.

This first issue of ENIAC is interesting on its premise alone. The first programmable computer, ENIAC, is created and immediately the US military wants to start using it for artillery patterns and other means to win World War II. Its creators oblige as they want the project to stay alive and opt to feed in the total sum of human knowledge at the time into ENIAC to see if that would help it compute equations faster. This splinters off from history as ENIAC develops a consciousness, and begins a slow campaign of terrorizing various world governments with its presence and it’s access to every nuclear arsenal across the globe.

Cut to present day, ENIAC has started a countdown and two agents are tasked with finding ENIAC, destroying it, and, most likely, saving humanity from whatever that countdown is signaling. The first issue is full of that global-stakes comics fun that permeates the best thrillers in the medium. But there’s also more.

So there is a reason the publisher decided to call themselves Bad Idea. ENIAC and all subsequent series will only be available in certain comic shops in small numbers and never in digital or trade paperback. For the most part, you have to have lucked out to even get a copy of this first issue. The owners of Bad Idea have stated in the past that this is their way of making sure their books are actually being purchased and it does make sense. How many times have we all walked into a comic shop only to see the dozens of long boxes filled with last year’s back issues? But on the other hand, how many people are going to be able to read this story? Kindt, Braithwaite, Rodriguez, and Larosa have put in a tremendous effort with this series, but is it going to become a classic that no one will be able to read?

Would ENIAC have received the same attention if it was being put out by a conventional publisher? I’m honestly not sure—geo-political thrillers are fairly popular right now and Kindt is a name people would gravitate toward. But how many variant and incentive covers would normally be put out for this kind of series? How many copies of the second and third issues would sit in a long box for years afterward at your local shop? There is good comics here, but I really hope it’s something people will be able to actually read.

Get excited. Hopefully get this story.

Drew Barth at Miami Book Fair in 2019.

Drew Barth (Episode 331) is a writer residing in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida. Right now, he’s worrying about his cat.

Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart #113: A Get Together

Some of the most popular manga are what is known as “slice-of-life” series. They are, as the name implies, series about the main characters’ lives and the various hijinks that permeate them. As stories, they’re meant to let the reader relax and lose themselves in the lives of characters that aren’t completely unlike them. And for the longest time, we didn’t really have serials like that in Western comics. There are many graphic novels that deal with mundanities of life, but those were always relegated to the single volume format. At least until Sina Grace, Omar Spahi, Mx. Struble, and Jenny D. Fine brought us their new series last year, Getting it Together.

Getting it Together has that distinct American sitcom feeling to it—a large cast of characters that all know each other, multiple plot lines that diverge and intersect, and a relationship dissolving as a catalyst for major character growth. The story itself centers on Lauren, ex-boyfriend of Sam and brother to Sam’s best friend, Jack. Jack is also the biggest fan of Lauren’s indie band, Nipslip, which is on the verge of implosion as Lauren and guitarist, Ashton, have slept together. The story spirals out of there with Nipslip’s members at each other’s throats, Jack becoming addicted to dating apps for validation, and Sam becoming increasingly despondent over his break-up with Lauren. In short, there’s quite a bit of mess coming from the group of friends.

What really makes Getting it Together such a fascinating story is how how Grace, Spahi, Fine, and Struble approach it. At no point does this feel like an exploitative look at other people’s lives—the story comes together like piecing together friend’s social media feeds and second-hand gossip in the best way. You crave the drama of people falling apart, but you want to keep an arm’s length from their mess. But at least this is the kind of story where the characters can come to the conclusion of an arc—Lauren begins her solo career, Sam moves in with Jack, and Jack stops trawling dating apps for quick hook-ups. While it is cathartic to witness a mess every once in a while, it’s also nice to see tangible growth at the end to let you know that there’s still some hope when friend groups begin to collapse.

As of right now, there aren’t many stories like Getting it Together coming from any of the major monthly publishers. At four issues, it’s a relatively quick read, but it’s still dense with character and pitch-perfect dialog throughout. It is the kind of series where you finish it and wonder why there aren’t at least a dozen longer running series taking this same approach to more grounded stories. People do love reading about heroes and fantasies, but sometimes we just want to sit down and read about a group of imploding friends. You know, for the fun of it.

Get excited. Get together.

Drew Barth at Miami Book Fair in 2019.

Drew Barth (Episode 331) is a writer residing in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida. Right now, he’s worrying about his cat.